Angélique
ou l'enchantement

Et puis cette image s'en allait à nouveau. Et c'était de nouveau trop tard. Il en irait donc pour les événements de notre passé comme pour ceux du présent : les arrêter n'est pas possible. Instants fragiles, aussi soudainement apparus que vite effacés, nous ne pouvons ni les tenir immobiles, ni en fixer la trace de façon définitive, ni les réunir en une durée continue au sein d'organisations causales à sens unique et sans faille. Ainsi ne saurais-je partager l'avis de Philippe Lejeune concernant la mise en texte des souvenirs. « L'exigence de signification est le principe positif et premier, dit-il, de la quête autobiographique. » Non, non! Certainement pas ! Cet axiome n'est valable, de toute évidence, ni pour le manuscrit dont la rédaction a occupé Corinthe pendant les deux dernières décennies de son existence, ni pour ma propre entreprise actuelle.

Il ne peut s'agir pour moi, en particulier, d'attribuer quelque unité profonde à ces instants de diamant précaires, ou ensuite à ces pans de brume, qui refusent les uns comme les autres l'emploi du passé historique, seul gage certifié de cohérence, de continuité, de chronologie, de causalité, de non-contradiction. J'ai beau m'ya essayer, ça ne prend pas: « On pensa qu'un pilleur cadavre... un pilleur d'épave... », etc. (voir plus haut). Bien vite, je dois revenir à l'indéfini et à l'instantané. En même temps que la cohérence du monde, s'est effondrée la compétence du narrateur. La patiente écriture des fragments qui demeurent (provisoirement, je le sais) ne peut en aucun cas considérer mon passé comme producteur de signification (un sens à ma vie), mais au contraire comme producteur de récit : un devenir à mon projet d'écrivain. Ce qui est à la fois plus honnête et plus exaltant.

Aussi, je vois très peu de différences entre mon travail de romancier et celui-ci, plus récent, d'autobiographe. Les éléments constitutifs, tout d'abord, sont bien de même nature, puisés dans le même trésor opaque. N'avais-je pas déjà introduit dans mes romans, dès le début, le décor vrai de mon enfance (les îles bretonnes d'Un régicide et du Voyeur), la mesure réelle de mon propre visage (prêtée à Wallas, le policier maladroit des Gommes), telle maison que j'avais en fait habitée (celle de La jalousie, qui était à Fort-de-France au-dessus de la rade, parmi les goyaviers et les cycas, et dont j'al recherché vainement le jardin ou la terrasse, il y a trois ans, dans le dédale des constructions modernes et des chantiers), des voyages aussi que j'avais accomplis jadis (à Hong-Kong, par exemple, dans La maison de rendez-vous, à l'époque lointaine des grandes jonques majestueuses et des sampans de rotin), et encore mes fantasmes sado-érotiques personnels (propriété commune à beaucoup de gens, il faut dire, dans Projet pour une révolution, Topologie, le Triangle d'or, etc.), l'usine où j'ai travaillé comme prolétaire (transportée de Nuremberg dans la ville d'Un régicide), et jusqu'aux petites filles que j'avais aimées, comme la Violette du Voyeur, qui s'appelait Angélique et dont je reparlerai plus loin, si y pense... Elle est morte très jeune, elle aussi, sur une falaise du pays de Léon, dans ce qu'il a bien fallu, faute de preuve, considérer comme un accident.

And then that image would go away again. And it was again too late. So it would be for the events of our past as for those of the present: stopping them is not possible. Fragile moments, appearing as suddenly as quickly erased, we can neither hold them still, nor fix their trace definitively, nor bring them together in a continuous duration within one-way and flawless causal organizations. Thus I could not share Philippe Lejeune's opinion concerning the textualization of memories. "The requirement of meaning is the positive and first principle," he says, "of the autobiographical quest." No, no! Certainly not! This axiom is clearly not valid either for the manuscript whose writing occupied Corinthe during the last two decades of his existence, nor for my own current enterprise.

For me, in particular, it cannot be a question of attributing some profound unity to these precarious golden moments, or then to these patches of fog, which both refuse the use of the passé historique, the only certified guarantee of coherence, continuity, chronology, causality, non-contradiction. No matter how I try, it does not work: "It was thought that a corpse plunderer... a wreck plunderer...", etc. (see above). Very quickly, I must return to the indefinite and the instantaneous. At the same time as the coherence of the world, the competence of the narrator has collapsed. The patient writing of the fragments that remain (temporarily, I know) can in no case consider my past as a producer of meaning (a sense to my life), but on the contrary as a producer of narrative: an evolution of my project as a writer. Which is both more honest and more exhilarating.

So I see very few differences between my work as a novelist and that, more recent, as an autobiographer. The constituent elements, first of all, are of the same nature, drawn from the same opaque treasure. Had I not already introduced into my novels, from the beginning, the true setting of my childhood (the Breton islands of A Regicide and The Voyeur), the real dimensions of my own face (lent to Wallas, the clumsy policeman in The Erasers), a house that I had actually lived in (that of Jealousy, which was in Fort-de-France above the harbor, among the guava trees and cycads, and whose garden or terrace I searched for in vain, three years ago, in the maze of modern buildings and building sites), trips also that I had made in the past (to Hong Kong, for example, in La maison de rendez-vous, in the distant era of the great majestic junks and rattan sampans), and also my personal sado-erotic fantasies (common property of many people, it must be said, in Project for a Revolution, Topology, Golden Triangle, etc.), the factory where I worked as a proletarian (transported from Nuremberg to the city of A Regicide), and even the little girls I had loved, like Violette from The Voyeur, who was named Angélique and whom I will speak about later, if I think about it... She also died very young, at a cliff in the region of Léon, in what, for lack of proof, had to be considered an accident.

It was also on a snowy day that we saw Le Mesnil for the first time. But it was a bright winter sun in a transparent, dry and crisp air. I wanted to live in the countryside, Catherine energetically refused the kind of restored farmhouse where one is too close to the bad weather, the mud, the village gossips, and on Sundays we visited more worthy residences for sale whose descriptions we had read in specialist newspapers. Most often, Jérôme Lindon accompanied us, and even drove us there in his own car since we did not have one, each time becoming enthusiastic about the enterprise as if it had not been as random as it was chimerical.

I will tell on another occasion (to the extent that I think about it) an even more illusory adventure, a few years earlier, Catherine going all alone to Brest in the middle of winter storms, to go with my mother to the side of Porsmoguer-en-Plouarzel with the intention of buying a disused coastal battery there, built by Vauban inside the cliff facing the open sea, in this extreme west of Finistère where, precisely, Henry of Corinth had died in such an austere retreat, exposed to the violence of the ocean. Mother already very old, my little wife who then seemed a child, had had to carry ladders on a rental van, in order to access the rare openings through the moats cut into the rock. The sale had taken place the next day, at a candlelight auction according to the old-fashioned ritual, and Catherine had quickly given up, for lack of the slightest penny, although the starting price was ridiculous.

Jérôme and I, at Editions de Minuit, talked in advance about our expeditions, cheerfully, carefree: "Next Sunday, could we go buy a castle?" This time, all three of us, from the path from where we could see the property through a hedge of thorns (we had arrived before the agreed time), were feverish with enthusiasm. The park, then almost abandoned, took on on the contrary in the dazzling snow, under the very pale blue sky, a clarity of refinement, but exciting, joyful. Alas, it was too beautiful: the grand staircase of open white stone, with its black banister forged under Louis XV, the white living room embellished with old gold where a low sun penetrated from side to side (from all sides at once!) through the four small-paned windows, the deep Louis XIV and Louis XVI fireplaces where enormous stumps burned, the frozen, sparkling water features, on which a little girl and a little boy in dark woolens skated as they had in the past, these timeless riches and many others were far beyond my modest means.

Without hesitation, Jérôme told me that it didn't matter, that he would advance me the money that was missing (that is to say, the greater part) and would then withhold it from my future royalties, which was a proof of friendship as much as of esteem, but could have seemed, at the time, a risky bet... Suddenly, Catherine and I were lords of the manor, by divine grace... The Normandy motorway did not yet exist and already we had to go home, our eyes full of dreams. That evening, driving towards Paris in his car, I remember telling Jérôme (was it a token of gratitude?) that the little girl in the Voyeur had really existed, like everything else in my books, that her name was neither Violette nor Jacqueline, but Angélique, and that I would perhaps tell her true story one day. Would I?

Her parents, whose wealthy ancestors had once held the upper hand in the old ghetto of Venice, bore the name Arno, which sounded almost Breton Fail, later known as the Eveno and Armeno in Morbihan. They spent their summer holidays in a beautiful Renaissance-style building dating from the 19th century, surrounded by a large wild park conducive to the imaginations of young people, very close to the sea (but at the bottom of a very sheltered cove, as often exist in the country of Léon) some three kilometers from our Maison Noire, which is located inland. The journey is not long by bicycle. Angélique is twelve years old and I am thirteen, she is smaller but undoubtedly more precocious and she enjoys exciting my young emotions in hand-to-hand combat where we pretend to fight. In fact, I am very afraid of hurting her in the slightest and she herself seems especially curious to rub against me, when I immobilize her in the grass, lying on her and holding her wrists.

One day, having just captured her after a long run, I squeeze her like this in a pile of fragrant hay where she has conveniently dropped, suddenly all limp and supposedly defeated, she says in a low voice, looking at me with her improbable blue eyes: "Bite my mouth, to punish me." My heart beats faster and I hesitate to understand. Punish her for what? Then, she opens her lips, which are fleshy and soft (I know, I touched them, as if by mistake). Wanting to comply, I release my grip. She protests, coaxing: "No, no! Hold me tight, or I'll run away..." I feel a kind of religious revelation, obscure, distressing: the desire for the other's desire. With my legs, I spread hers to crush her thighs and her belly, as if I wanted to open her in two, a shell split by force by surprise. She lets me do it, while feigning a weak revolt, so that I feel the fever of possession rise in my flesh. However, I barely dare to lick, then nibble her offered mouth. She pushes me away suddenly, brutally, to straighten up in a leap like a kid. Then she sulks, mute and distant. They say that girls don't know what they want.

I think she plays similar games with more mature boys. But, with me, she must feel safer, mistress of all her cards. My very young age, my shy and tender air, my voice that changes, which I use as little as possible so much do I fear its failings, my undeniable state of virginity, all reassure her and authorize her to push the provocation much further than with adults. She compensates for the lack of seriousness, that is to say the few real risks that she runs in my arms, by the call real risks that she runs in my arms, by the brazen call to more violent outrages. In a sense, she makes fun of me; but in a sense only, because I learn quite quickly to enjoy her on the sly, when she allows our embraces to be prolonged a little. Children who live in the countryside, even if it is not on a farm, know very early on the female dog in heat pursued by the males who force her in turn into long and painful matings, the heifer brought to the bull who weighs twice as much as her and licks her slimy vulva before the "sabre blow", the stallion who must be helped to penetrate the one of his too big, clumsy penis. As for Angélique, she tells me in confidence with a greedy horror cruel stories of rape, all concerning, according to her, teenage girls or young girls from the area, which sometimes end, to complicate the scene, with the throat slitting of a little victim whose bruised body is found in a thicket, still warm and bleeding everywhere.

Having made me share these emotions with a few new intimate details, lying this time against each other on the warm sand in the hollow of the rocks, she whispers in my ear in a breath of confession, or as if she were afraid of frightening a bird: "You can look under my skirt, if you want: I didn't put my panties on." I begin to work out her traps and unpredictable mood swings; I answer just in case that it's not true. Nevertheless, as she smiles kindly with a knowing air, pretending for my part to commit an inconsequential annoyance, but, in reality, with as much precaution as the altar boy who removes, on the altar, a square of pink silk covering the Holy Grail, I lift the flounces of the short flowered dress in light fabric. She is naked, indeed. There is, at the bottom of her belly, a triangle of very pale red down, the same color as her hair. In a brusque tone of command, she says: "Kiss!" But before I have time to react, she suddenly pulls down her skirt and jumps to her feet. Motionless and straight two steps away from me, struggling in vain to remove the grains of sand that she has made fly into my eyes (on purpose?) and that are burning me, she looks at me with a contempt of which I do not understand the cause. "How stupid you can be!" she concludes with a sort of rage, incomprehensible. A few seconds later, her voice has become cold and hard: "I will tell Mom that you tried to rape me."

The following week she forgot everything, while I did not dare come back, thinking myself in disgrace. It is a heavy and stormy heat. She uses the pretext of a downpour that has just soaked her clothes (I saw that she lingered as long as possible in the heavy rain) to undress completely, in the blink of an eye, in the barn where we have taken refuge, whose heavy door she has closed not without difficulty. The place is torrid under its roof of thin slates, a little oppressive in the half-light, cluttered among the interweaving of openwork half-timbering, braces and rafters, by discarded machines, tall cart wheels, sawhorses for sawing wood. Without showing the slightest embarrassment, Angélique spreads out her wet things on it, as if she intended to wait here until everything is dry. Overwhelmed with desire, I remain paralyzed. She has a white and pink body, almost without a tan (which increases her shamelessness), where the secret regions are even more milky and almost luminescent: her small buttocks with the elasticity of satin (I have often taken them in my hands, in our false struggles, but protected by the dress and the panties), the kidneys whose hollow arches, a waist already marked between the hips which round and brand new breasts, still small, of which she must be very proud.

She does not pay attention to me, but she knows that I spy on her with all my eyes. As if it were a banal thing, without importance, she says while looking elsewhere: "Do you find me pretty?" It is as if she is looking for a mirror. Not getting an answer, she starts to do gymnastics on makeshift apparatus (she boasted several times of studying classical dance, in Paris). Having discovered a bundle of sagging ropes used to restrain animals, struck by inspiration (or on the contrary carrying out a plan that had been thought out in advance?), she suggests with detachment: "We should play at being Roman soldiers and Christian slaves." She then claims that everything around us, the complicated wooden assemblies, the iron harrows and the enormous long-toothed saws (for cutting up logs), the winches, the axes and the logs, are ancient instruments of torture; and she begins to tell me about the edifying end of her patron saint, a blessed virgin who had just reached her thirteenth year (she claims) on the day of her torture, in the year of grace 304, a detail which — I checked it in an illustrated martyrology, found at a second-hand dealer in Vaison-la-Romaine — is not really in accordance with what tradition reports.

That year, towards the end of September, Angélique had her first period. Or had she hidden it from me the month before? (It was less convenient in those days when there were no discreet tampons that are now such flashy and delightful advertisements.) Such precocious puberty must, in any case, be exceptional in a normal child, in our climate. And, unfortunately for me, I knew almost nothing about these mysteries of the gynaeceum, which do not exist in the females of other mammals. Since the afternoon of "the young martyr", when she had also wanted to shamelessly inspect my difference as a boy, Angélique had let me kiss her, caress her, and sometimes take my pleasure in rubbing myself on her, completely naked, preferably tied up: this seemed to her perhaps a sufficient alibi, which excused in some way the abandonment of her silkiest skin, between her well-split buttocks or in the hollow of her groin, against the inside of her thigh and her soft pubis with its frail squirrel fur. She knew she had nothing to fear from less superficial damage.

But then, once freed from her agreed bonds, it was not rare for her to resume her threats: if she denounced me, who would want to believe that she had agreed? Would I have needed, in that case, to tie her up? And she showed me the red mark of the cords on her wrists or ankles, the last vestiges of which were fading in barely an hour, so much had I feared tightening too tightly. (However, I knew how to tie sailor's knots and this science, learned with the fishermen, had at first earned me some prestige in the severe eyes of my captive, always quick to mock.) Seeing that I dreaded scandal and that she held me in fact at her mercy, by these very chains with which she forced me to constrain her (and which, moreover, pleased me well: even crucified without too much rigor, she would at least not be able to flee, as soon as the desire took her, if I ventured on new embraces or more ambiguous abuse), she soon took advantage of this situation to reverse the roles, transforming me into a sort of servant subject to all her whims.

When she asked me to caress the inside of her sex, I sensed the danger, but I was no longer able to refuse her anything. The forbidden slit seemed as usual pink and clean, well closed. As she did from time to time, Angélique had enhanced her childish scent with her mother's spray, who was as red-haired as she was and matched the same perfumes. The girl, today, seemed to have used the precious bottle without restraint. Guided by her firm hand, I gently introduced the first phalanx of the middle finger where she wanted. I noticed immediately that the inside was liquid, a little sticky.

I would have liked to break my clumsy engagement in this pitfall, but my mistress held me in place and heard on the contrary that I move my finger to push it further. A stream of blood escaped between the disjointed lips and I, with a quick movement, withdrew my hand, which was red as a ripper's.

Fortunately, I was sitting on a milking stool, otherwise I might have fallen, so much had the emptiness suddenly invaded my head and my whole body. Angélique did not move: standing in front of me, legs open, her limbs were free (which I should have been wary of) and, fully dressed, had simply taken off her panties (when? I had seen nothing). She looked at me with an absent, enigmatic air. What had happened? I had seriously injured her and she was going to die for lack of care, without us daring to seek help. The blood that had flowed at the bottom of the red fleece, fuller now than at the beginning of the holidays, appears in my memories abundant and rosy. Angelique watched my panic without saying anything, then she let fall her ample pleated skirt of winter fabric, which she held with one hand, and she declared in a hard, mean voice: "You deflowered me. I will tell everything. You will go to prison, for the rest of your life."

I knew vaguely what a young girl's hymen was, because of a rather specific bawdy song that my early school years were astonished by, then by the innuendos and boasting of older kids, but I did not suspect that the obstacle had been so shallow. Besides, I had not encountered any resistance from the flesh. And why did Angélique remain so calm and seem so little moved by the catastrophe? Still curtly, she ordered me: "Suck your finger!" What a strange remedy! As if I had injured myself? I did as she wanted, totally stunned, then I licked the neighboring phalanges, on the index and ring fingers, and also the palm where blood had flowed. It was acrid and sweetish at the same time. I did not dare spit. When my hand was cleaned of all the red streaks, it still had a stale, sickening smell, but it could have been the perfume... Suddenly, other obscene jokes came back to me, about girls... Angelique continued, in her same indifferent and icy voice: "Do you think it smells good? Don't you know what it is? It's cursed blood! While you were drinking it, I cast a spell on you. Now you are impotent forever."

I didn't see her again the next day, or the day after. Or ever again. Was she sick? Had they taken her to the Bonnes Sœurs hospital in Saint-Paul-de-Leon? It would have been convenient to believe so. But, deep down, I knew right away where she was hidden.

Her body was found at the foot of the cliff, at low tide, in a place known to be dangerous where we were forbidden to play. She was floating between two waters, pale Ophelia, in a deep, clear hole between dark, rounded, slippery rocks. Long red algae undulated around her, laminaria and whips of Satan, as if to hold her by her slender, limply spread limbs. A seaweed harvester brought her back on his already full cart. He wasn't going to make an extra trip, with his old horse and the hill to climb, for the kid of a Parisian woman, who was also a demon and her mother too perhaps.

It was already cold, since the equinox and its storms. The teenager was naked. We thought that the waves had undressed her. No one noticed the black woolen overcoat that hung over the precipice, much higher than the highest seas. The doctor acknowledged that her virginity remained intact, which took a weight off my chest for no reason. But he noted light marks around the wrists and ankles, doubtless the trace of improvised bracelets made by little girls, of elastics stretched too tight on new socks, of her expanders for gymnastics, or of who knows what absurd children's games.

I said I hadn't seen her for several days and that I didn't know anything. No one insisted. It could just as well have been suicide (some youthful heartache), or the crime of a maniac: a passing traveler or a fairground worker. The quick investigation wisely concluded that it was an accident. Her small ebony coffin, with silver ornaments and handles, with a silver cross still inlaid in the lid, left for some distant cemetery on a funeral carriage drawn by four black horses, which had been harnessed one in front of the other because of the narrowness of the sunken roads.

I myself left the house where she was born a long time ago. I'm not in Le Mesnil either, but in Greensboro, in the Carolinas. I live alone there. It's October 12, 1987. It's not snowing outside.