A quiet patriotism and humility

Angelo DiMarco was a US Army Ranger who survived the decimation of the Ranger First Battalion, who endured psychological torture, and as a POW made a harrowing escape from certain death in a labor camp. His story is a testament of survival, quiet patriotism and a memorial to lost comrades, and a story told with sincere humility and gratitude. At Cisterna di Latina, he engaged an overwhelming enemy. The explicit German victory shattered the Ranger First Battalion and forced the US Army to reassess its strategy in the early days of World War 2. The Nazis so destroyed the city that it took until the 1970s for Italy to rebuild it.

Angelo’s stoicism is both what is admirable and tragic about More Than A A Soldier. Most men of his generation did not talk about war. His story emerges after decades of silence, after his death in 2010. Most men of that era did not admit to wanting to kill for their country. Angelo wanted to kill. He sought out combat. He recounts his first kill. Men of The Greatest Generation did not express their emotions. My grandfather’s emotional rapport, for example, was limited to a handshake. These men did their service, came home, put their papers, medals (and memories) into a literal and metaphorical box, and then went out to get an education under the GI Bill, or a job somewhere because that is what men do. The inherent tragedy is that what we now call PTSD went untreated. I have no doubt that Angelo suffered from it.

War is the backdrop in this well-written and respectful narrative. The ‘real story’ is Angelo’s relationship with his family and with the family in Italy who harbored him at great personal risk. Angelo’s Italian father is himself a man of a different time and place: patriarchal and impossible to please. It’s moving and painful to read how Angelo begged for one crumb of acknowledgement from his dad, and just as visceral as Angelo’s account of how he had felt inadequate around his family in Italy. He wanted to pull his own weight, earn his keep, and felt embarrassed that he was vulnerable. Like most men of that generation, he made a promise to his family abroad and Angelo kept his word. His gratitude, his humility are virtues, and that I did not once feel preached at, or reminded of Angelo’s extraordinary heroism is a high compliment to D.M. Annechino’s understated and laudable style.  

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Aurélien Masson, Life is a Thrill(er)

An article from Libération  by Sabrina Champenois that I translated for NoirCon16. Space and consideration prevented it from its inclusion in the conferences proceedings.

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His rock star looks and exalted nature clash with the milieu of publishing, but the boss of Gallimard’s Série Noire has proven himself.

Photo credit: © Fred Kihn

Since first meeting him ten years ago, little to nothing has changed. Always with the allure of a gutter cat, dry and nervous, he wears black from head to toe, in jeans, a rock T-shirt (The Stooges this time) under a leather jacket. Aurélien Masson keeps – he’ll be forty soon – a post-adolescent pace, jacked up by a machine-gun-like flow, theatrical movements, a carnivorous smile, and fervor of worldliness. In his Paris Headquarters, a bar just a step away from the Lyon Station, he looks the mantra “Love.” Nevertheless, Masson does not work at Harlequin, but at Gallimard’s Série Noire, the den of national thrillers previously embodied by Marcel Duhamel, Robert Soulat and Patrick Raynal – not exactly sissies. And Masson doesn’t dress up the seventy-old Dame Gallimard. In one decade, the reckless dandy injected some new blood – especially, French — some adrenaline; some gambles from poker and reinvigorated Gallimard in an already hypercompetitive and swollen market. Ballsy, yes — but in his own way. “Ah yes, I call him the Feisty Horse,” smiles Caryl Férey (Mapuche), the gatekeeper and gondolier of Série Noire, according to Masson.

For love of the author. We find him bent over a manuscript – Help! A caricature. But his authors affirm in unison, Masson is obsessed with texts, ‘You can’t find anyone more involved in them.’ (Férey). The deep-sea diver, they say, is coupled with a patient, precise and loyal publisher. DOA, the acronymic pseudonym of a Série Noire author, which comes from the 1950 Rudolph Maté noir film, Dead On Arrival, was a 2015 sensation with his novel Pukhtu, the first in a series: “He is curious, open, and under his rock-and-roll restlessness and vibe, very cultivated. His idea is not so much to publish texts as it is to publish good texts […] in which authors and he himself find themselves.” Dominque Manotti (or Noir [Gold Medal series]), mistress of the sociopolitical thriller: “Aurélien is hyper-attentive and hard-working. With him, you feel that your publisher is there every moment.” Elsa Marpeau, a sounder of psychological depths: “He’s with you deep inside [the work], but distant enough to point out what is missing.”

The Oulipian [‘Oulipe’ is a school of critical literary theory in which the text does not have any inherent authority] Jean-Bernard Pouy: “He reads well and beyond his zombie demeanor, he has maintained a line, one of socio-political criticism.” The man of the hour speaks for his part as a paradoxical gang leader, a mothering type: “I need to make them happy, I tell them, ‘You’re right,’ all the while making suggestions; I do that so that they are treated better, so that there are no cuts, so that they make out better in the end. I also tell them to be ambitious, even if this kind of talk is frowned upon in the circles of the Polar [crime-thriller genre]. For my part, I am not in the aesthetics of sabotage.”

For love of love. Does Aurélien Masson owe his name to the emperor or to [Louis] Aragon, whose eponymous novel was published by Gallimard? We did not ask him. But if the second proposition were true, it would be a premonition. The admirer of Huysmans, Bukowksi, Céline, Ferrara, and other big lights, exudes the need for the absolute, for hardcore feelings [XXL is a television channel for erotica], ‘too much’ possibly embarrassing for the upholders of dignity but not deprived of panache in this era of thinking small where the social network takes the place of the public meeting places, of the I’ll-just-keep-myself-hidden-behind-my-keyboard kind.’ Masson says candidly that he ‘adored’ the meeting, and then sends a text-message, which he closes with childish ‘kisses’ says that if he loves a text. “I’m going to love the author, otherwise, it doesn’t last.” Caryl Férey: “He always has a kind word, of the type, ‘Oh, you were beautiful today,’ not exactly the kind of thing guys say to each other.” The affection takes a viral turn, causing the warship DOA to say, “I love him. However improbable it might seem, work and life made us friends.” At the same time, there’s a boomerang effect; Masson goes through roller coaster periods of great highs and great lows. It is just as well as he had the means right from the start to be moody. The son of a good Parisian family, with a doctor father who was a star of homeopathy and a mother mainly in advertising then a psychoanalyst, grew up in the posh 5th district. He had and always has had for a friend Raphaël (a singer today), and did not last long at the Lycée Henri-IV, “a factory of champions obsessed with exams.” In sum, the child Aurélien, a fan of McEnroe, Connors, and Lendl, dreams first of being a tennis player but a proclivity for tendinitis and anti-competitiveness torpedoes his whims for sports. He is succeeded by an adolescent Aurélien who just didn’t have it together, “hyper-shy,” glued to video games, who would “not know girls before twenty years old,” but who discovered “rock, joints, and the literature of thrillers from the bios of serial killers.” The third is still the same today (“I shall never be under the influence of cocaine or ecstasy, these capitalist drugs for traders; me, I need slowness”). His entrance into Série Noire, as a reader of English-language texts under Patrick Raynal, takes place after going to school for history and sociology and a road-trip of one year in Asia, mostly in an opium haze.

For love of life and death. Aurélien Masson is a father, for two years now. Named Iggy, in tribute to “the Iguana” and ex–Stooges, but Joey had its chance, in honor of The Ramones. Iggy’s mother, his Brazilian partner, is a legal specialist in copyrights. It seems that the affair sometimes takes rock-n-roll turns, with, on Masson’s side, “moments of absolute depression.” But there is good resolution in the air: “I try to find a happy medium, between joy and self-destruction.” To be consumed without burning too deeply: a tall order for a guy under Nirvana’s grunge influence, who loves the dark and even the sticky and is said to be obsessed with death, and defends “laborious texts,” and losers, and “guys who missed the train.” France moreover delights him, in its tensions and its depression: “France becomes more and more interesting as matrix of the crime novel, we’re witnessing a fallen world.” Hence his interest in “the guys who shit” — Marc-Edouard Nabe, Pierre Carles, Emmanuel Todd – arises from the coherence. Masson likes when things scrape, slip, disturb. Masson defends obstinately Antoine Chainas, author of baroque, claustrophobic, poisonous thrillers, not the usual easy-sell publisher drug. Masson recently even considered publishing the text of an obscure policeman, in alexandrines; he is still buzzing about it. A paper kamikaze? The quivering soul does not lay any claim to heroism, nor to sacrifice, points to the benefit: “It is through books that I find again the flame that we have in youth, this capacity to feel emotions crazily.” It is a question of remaining alive, in the end.

19 September 1975 Born in Paris.

1989 Discovers rock.

2000 Arrives at Gallimard, as a reader.

2005 Succeeds Patrick Raynal at Série Noire and meets Diana, his companion.

2013 Birth of Iggy.

2015 70 years of Série Noire.

© Sabrina Champenois for Libération

— 1 July 2015 at 6:06 pm

Translation: Gabriel Valjan

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Crazy by Elsa Marpeau

Not a translation, but the slightest of edits to words from Elsa Marpeau to Aurélien Masson for NoirCon16, where Masson received the David Goodis Award.

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Aurélien is a crazy man, a crazy editor.

Five years ago, I sent a sci-fi manuscript to Gallimard. Aurélien Masson read it and called me. He said this text could not be in Série Noire, but he would publish my other book.

“Which book?” I asked. There was obviously no next book yet.

“The next one. The one you are about to write.”

He had seen me once, for hardly an hour, and even then I hadn’t known at the time that I was about to write this next book.

However, he committed to publishing it and I took him at his word.

I published my first book with Aurélien, and the second one too, and the fifth.

How crazy does that sound?

-Elsa Marpeau

Titles at Gallimard.

Photo Catherine Hélie © Éditions Gallimard

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Vicious Circle: Antoine Chainas à Aurélien Masson

Not a translation, but the slightest of edits to words from Antoine Chainas to Aurélien for NoirCon16, where Masson received the David Goodis Award.

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Violent thunder shook the window.

It had been raining in Philadelphia since the beginning of the week. The heavy dirty rain looked as if it would never stop. Aurélien was here, in his hotel room. Lack of sleep had him in a bit of a daze. He was staring at the NoirCon 2016 printed program Lou had given him the day before. The pages were as sharp as a razor blade and Aurélien had cut his thumb leafing through them. He was now sucking the blood from his finger, reading once again the moronic short story Chainas had written for him. A kind of unfunny Borgesian joke. He couldn’t believe the words printed in the program. The story went like this:

Violent thunder shook the window.

 

It had been raining in Philadelphia since the beginning of the week. The heavy dirty rain looked as if it would never stop. Aurélien was here, in his hotel room. Lack of sleep had him in a bit of a daze. He was staring at the NoirCon 2016 printed program Lou had given him the day before. The pages were as sharp as a razor blade and Aurélien had cut his thumb leafing through them. He was now sucking the blood from his finger, reading once again the moronic short story Chainas had written for him. A kind of unfunny Borgesian joke. He couldn’t believe the words printed in the program. The story went like this:

Violent thunder shook the window…

© Antoine Chainas. Titles at Gallimard

Photos Catherine Hélie © Éditions Gallimard

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Roars in favor of Aurélien Masson: Part II

Second part of the translation. Link to Part I.

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Aurélien’s strategy is predicated on a disruptive style. He builds an asymmetrical collection that makes Série Noire the unique thing it is. While fitting it into a project that exceeds the framework of a genre, a project essentially contemporary, he gives to Série Noire the function of identifying this literature stripped of sanctity and consecration. The incarnation of the word, we prefer texture – the text like a body that we manipulate. Through the verb, the novel supplies a sensitive translation of our experience of the world. The crime novel – this loose and forbidden literature – puts into gear the dark desire to be witness to the fall and to the Decadence Movement [a late 19th-century artistic and literary movement].

The history of the publishing house Gallimard reminds us that the classic collection in a white cover has the ambition to propose “an extraordinary purification of literature.” Série Noire represents its absolute opposite, right down to its pages that contain an extraordinary degradation. This state of corruption finds itself not only in what we understand as the crime novel, but also more profoundly in this more ambiguous term: crime thriller. Behind the slang diminutive [“polar” is short for “roman policier,” with the derogatory “-ard” particle added, though not negative when the ‘d’ is dropped in this word] that we use readily to characterize the more or less popular novels that have their origin in the detective novel lurks a hazy etymology related to photography. I understand, as others do, that the thriller is also derived from Polaroid, from that snapshot of poor quality, the unfortunate trace of a moment.

In considering photographic creation, Roland Barthes proposes on the one hand a purely emotional approach that he defines as the point, and on the other, a retrospective or memorial approach which he summarizes as “what was.” This double appreciation shows how much photography is founded on a sensitive reporting of reality. So then to prop this too fast and fraudulent demonstration, this intimacy onto the Polaroid reminds me of the parallel that Georges Bataille discerns between literary creation and the development of photography. So, it is a question in the framework of the novel to consider that the narrative is used as the process that proceeds to the appearance of the image – the final result leading to the conclusion, to the limited density of the verbal universe thus created. Necessarily, for Georges Bataille, it is not so much the photographic object that interests him as the process of taking the picture. The process of the Polaroid shows that the literary form of the noir novel has accelerated due to its contact with the contemporary world, becoming more like a snapshot, adapting the basic rules of aesthetics, committing to the anecdotal. This snapshot reveals in the limited framework of the crime novel the deficiency of a universe that grows smaller as its technical ambitions increase in size. In planting its roots profoundly into crime fiction, Série Noire becomes a more violent witness of it. With this disrespect originating from the gutter, it hijacks crime fiction to transform it into crime of fiction. The crime thriller goes against all propriety.

From then on, the noir novel proposes a revelation — not divine — but chemical: highlighting the world through its dark zones. It becomes emancipated of aesthetic constraints, free of gratuitous illuminations, self-sufficient processes, and accelerates the decay of a modern literature condemned to regeneration. At this time of an nth era of suspicion – Is it necessary to write to tell? Is it necessary to tell to write? – in the decay of narrative structures, in the rubble of style, in the perversion of the subjects, blossom new flowers of Jean Paulhan’s Flowers of Tarbes [a history of twentieth century literary criticism, published in 1941 and translated into English in 2006, and whose subtitle is “terror in literature.”]

Drawing its energy from moldering topsoil, Série Noire does godless work. It explores and maps madness and derangement as the unstable and logical outcome of a literary tradition of degeneration.

Ancient myth conceives itself as the intermingling between reality and invention. The verb shows its capacity to generate a territory bigger than that identified by the human senses. The Hybris — the demon of violence — of the Ancients, fulminates between the lines of a universe where gods and people mix.

In the Middle Ages God is rarely embodied in the text. His presence is glimpsed through intercessions – from rare interventions, appearances, and messages. The fiction remains, from myths to songs, the divine and human spheres part. We remember Roland blowing into his horn. The brain escapes from the ears under the force of the effort. Then, he tries vainly to break his sword on the marble. His failure shows that man demands his part of the divine in vain. He becomes magnificent from it through the weakness of his humanity. The hero’s deficiency makes this act even more heroic.

Then, man’s place collapses as literary fiction approaches reality. New limits, always more binding, drive the divine out of the text. Man in the heart of words – literature is transformed into a laboratory that pushes us toward decadence. Finally, modern literature is deprived of the deus ex machina. The literature models itself on pure machine or machination. In God’s absence, man doubts his own presence.

Today, the crime novel is made the paragon of outrageousness – extravagance and insult – of the mediocre. By displaying the fringes, the crime novel reveals these mythological figures nourished with the anguish and follies of our time. A literature of deficiency, it reports the collapse at the core of the text – stories of internal collapse, people who consume themselves.

The end of the marvelous, the abandonment of the sacred, the devastation of the laboratory and the burns of decadence, doubt and mediocrity condemn the word to appear under its simplest nature – rough and unrefined: a deletion. Emptied of all substance, the exposed word has nothing more to tell. Here it is reduced to simple testimony of the practice of human writing.

The fictional engine of this 21st century lives in the exploitation of anxiety and ennui. The art of fiction is made minor. It’s not surprising that fiction develops from now on in the atmospheres of the police and crime – a search for the human in the daily blackness. The narrowing of the novel’s narrative framework is echoed in the verb. It’s not a question anymore of transcending a word or a vision that surpasses man, but to transmit the magnificence of the unimportant, to discover the magnificent in the unimportant.

The crime novel builds itself between the lines, by inventorying the void. In the manner of Beckett, literature turns on itself like a whirlpool. It devours itself as it develops. The crime novel glorifies mediocrity in the proper sense of this term – that is to say, in this sadness, which is not tragic, or in this greatness without heroism. It expresses contemporary idleness, work deprived of work exposing man deprived of a piece of work.

This literature recounts the strangeness of daily life, the grandeurs and decadences of ordinary people. It brings nothing more – it offers no direction, and it proposes no solution. The noir novel expresses nothing more than its own search within literature. It neither answers a question, nor asserts or counters. Thus, it does not reassure, it does not please, it does not amuse; it is the translation of a verbal relationship to the world between the writer and the external. The noir novel testifies to a dark form of creation that hits “the gut.”

While he’s alive, I shall not sing the praises of Aurélien Masson. It will be time to do that when his corpse goes to merge itself in the substance of Série Noire. Likewise, I shall not pass judgment against Série Noire because it answers no moral objective. Literature draws a snapshot topography that combines a multitude of clichéd Polaroids. Today, Aurélien ensures its continued existence by immortalizing its decay. They both have much to produce yet.

Thus, we wish them nothing.

We shout so that they continue.

16 February 2016

© Photo of Aurélien Masson by Fred Kihn

© Frédéric Jaccaud. Titles at Gallimard

© Translation from the French by Gabriel Valjan

Photo of Frédéric Jaccaud by Catherine Hélie © Éditions Gallimard

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Roars in favor of Aurélien Masson: Part I

I translated this essay from Frédéric Jaccaud, who wrote it in honor of Aurélien Masson the editor of Série Noire at Gallimard and the recipient of the David Goodis Award at NOIRCON 2016. Space and cost prevented its inclusion in the conference proceedings. In [brackets] I have placed allusions to French culture and literature. Jaccaud pulled out all the stops to honor Masson. This ‘shout out’ essay is a tour de force of the French essai genre littéraire; it is the most difficult and challenging essay I have ever translated. Link to Part II.

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He asks her to tell him what the penis looked like of the man made of masses of stone. She says that it looked as if it were an object from the beginning of the world, unrefined and ugly, that it was the petrified state of desire, always full, hard and painful as a wound.

-Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair

For ten years, Aurélien Masson has presided as head of Série Noire. Is it necessary to pass judgment on this decade of publications while the interested party is still in his Paris office? It’s a loaded question to pay tribute to a man still alive; even more so when it’s your own publisher you’re talking about. There is just something suspicious about it all. However, Aurélien accepts his celebrity status – kind of like a nervous, tireless and exuberant nephew of Rameau [Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, or the Second Satire]. He’ll appreciate the grotesque situation – the cynicism, the bombast, the irony carrying him on self-sufficient pretentiousness. (Photo credit: Thibault Stipal)

Short of lingering over the bibliographical and anecdotal elements, I think that it is more appropriate to look at this old Série Noire and the Aurélien-hyped double-duty as publisher and editor. In fact, the shift of this collection where “the spirit is rarely conformist” towards shady territories, forces us to deal with contemporary literature, the trendy crime novel.

When he defines his personal vision of the literature, Aurélien often uses a martial vocabulary. We see him as a general (routed, to respect a romanticism of the bastards or traitor, at the very least) reviewing his bookcase of fights. This lexical posture explains brutally the daily urgency to develop a furious literary landscape, to breathe into Série Noire this breath of rotted teeth, which becomes him so well.

So that we don’t make a mistake here: Série Noire is not at war against the world…it reveals it in the prism of darkness.

There is in the crime novel no battle to wage and he sides with nobody, but rages like a mercenary, living off plundering and robberies. Any risk of dying on the field of honor – in this fake battle, we drag ourselves through mud, the only feat of arms where fear and small size are more common than heroism and glory. A posture of revolt and resistance matters little as long as the libertarian creed is respected.

It is while exploring this martial metaphor to the point of wearing it out that we notice that the regular armies in publishing favor the collective shots that are aimed at the heart of the hypothetical target, the successive circles of which – infernal, mediocre territories – represent more or less significant sectors of the public; that is, more or less massive commercial success. This generalized tactic, the historic Série Noire, almost in spite of itself, applies it with a roguish irony. Old Dame Gallimard gives herself permission to throw her assassin darts off-mark. This voluntary shift characterizes the atavistic arrogance of the collection. (Natalie Toro as Madame DeFarge)

The constitution of Série Noire entails a deviation on the part of the editors, the writers, the artists and others involved in this tangential adventure. From then on, it bears with joy the stigmas attached to its birth by eyeing relentlessly the eccentric, in the double sense of the word.

1. In the geographical sense, Série Noire pilfers works and disreputable authors who venture into forbidden territories. So, it shifts away from the traditional center of literary interests by putting on as a rallying symbol a visual identity that runs contrary to the tradition. His black body screams its philosophy explicitly: it abandons the exploration of the fringes of a genre already reduced and reducing in the absolute of literature.
2. In the genetic sense, it tends towards more subtle, even dangerous regions, what we could consider psychiatric. It is a question of rubbing against perversion as Sade or Georges Bataille understood it. Of perversion born from the gutter, the dirty inmost depths of man’s mental aberrations à la Artaud’s Héliogabale. [Surrealists author Antonin Artaud wrote a life of the Roman emperor Elagabalus.]

If there is around the corpse of Héliogabale, dead without a grave, his throat slit by the police in the palace sewers, an intense traffic of blood and excrement, there is around his cradle an intense circulation of sperm.

Here is found the essence of Série Noire à la Masson that attaches to and detaches from genres, from labels, from the codes and the rules of the crime novel: from any fictional element that would be defining and thus discriminating. The collection represents at best the idea of a hesitating genre, which it does not stop paradoxically from manhandling through time. This clashing attitude towards the genre, to which it gives overwhelming support, attests to the vitality of Série Noire. It shows for all to see a torn coat-of-arms.

In this period of remembrance, while Série Noire inherits the benevolent surname of “old Dame,” we cannot refrain from imagining that under this old leathery meat hides the bold young person, the loose woman, the cynical madam, masking under her reddened lips a row of suspicious teeth. This narcotic euphemism cannot change this creature, which will always prefer the role of a whore to that of a mom, for such is its genetic fingerprint.

Unlike the exegetes and the nostalgic, Aurélien avoids the misleading trap of The Story. The former English-language and French-language masters of the Série Noire built the strong image of the collection, maybe the genre itself, what we call “crime thriller” in France in the absence of crime novel. This respect inherited retroactively must not lead us to forget that the authors of yesteryear built a literature anchored in their time. They worked synchronically (in France with the understandable delay due to translations) without ever dreaming of paving the way or drawing unbridgeable limits. We cannot hold on to this unctuous and reassuring attitude of observer of the venerable ones.

The Chandlers, the Hammetts, the McBains, or the Goodises didn’t ask for anything of the sort, no more than the French New Wave or the magnificent eccentrics, Manchette and A.D.G. [Alain Dreux Gallou] in front, on to Daniel Pennac and Maurice G. Dantec. They have in common the irreverence, the formal savagery, and especially the will to create a literature engaged with reality.

So the longevity of Série Noire does not condemn it to sink into the archive of nostalgia and to the reduplication of the seminal works. Aurélien positions himself as synchronic publisher and editor who works on and in the modernity of the literature. He welcomes the work of those who had come before without fear. The strong personality of the collection asserts itself in the diachronic understanding of works published to date. At this stage, it is not a question of respecting limits, but of starting up again and pursuing a path into the unknown.

For the nearsighted, the current Série Noire looks like a confused collection of genres in fiction that includes the crime thriller, police procedural, war, thrillers, vice, some espionage, fantasy, Norwegian, etc. As such, these editorial choices are petty; a spot check, or an economic, marketing cheap shot lost within an indefinite sea of lesser fictions, which reveals the whims of an egotistical publisher. That’s not the case, naturally. It is to forget the substance of the Série Noire, of which Aurélien, in following his plan, happens to be a consistent smuggler. In this context, bad taste, commercial failures, and unclassifiable works cheerfully manhandle a desperate literary environment that tries to reestablish contact with the world.

Link to Part II

© Frédéric Jaccaud. Titles at Gallimard.

© Translation from the French by Gabriel Valjan

Photo Catherine Hélie © Éditions Gallimard

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In my memory…

I translated this short essay from Thomas Bronnec in honor of Gallimard’s editor Aurélien Masson, who received the David Goodis Award at NOIRCON 2016. Space and cost prevented its inclusion in the conference’s program.

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In my memory, it’s a space of greenery with a table and chairs, set on gravel and I no longer remember what we were drinking – if we were drinking something. An oasis, a palm grove, a place unaffected by time and turmoil where I hear, for the first time, someone telling me about this girl, the Girl from Hanh Hoa, and tells me that he loves her but that he wasn’t going to adopt her. I don’t know now whether he is wearing one of his rock or punk t-shirts or whether he has his Perfecto leather jacket on his shoulders, but I know that I’m listening to him and I’m looking at him and what I didn’t forget, his smile and face – I see them as if it was yesterday and I say to myself that if it is my words and my story that trigger such an enthusiasm then everything is allowed. Eight years later, this time it isn’t greenery but a text message and then a little later, a table and other chairs. And this time I remember what we are drinking. And I’m hearing him again talking about these girls, about other girls and about the men who betrayed them, but if it were just that, stories about girls, we wouldn’t even be going on about this. It’s a revelation and this revelation, I still want to see it on that face, no matter what triggers or sets it in motion because those flashes he always has and that bright everything around, he deserves them. He deserves them and more because he’s the only one who knows how to talk like that about your stories and your characters, and sometimes even better than you. How lucky I am that he was on the same path where I was, one day, and that he stopped.

Dans mon souvenir, c’est un espace de verdure avec une table et des chaises, posées sur du gravillon et je ne me souviens plus ce qu’on boit – si on boit quelque chose. Une oasis, une palmeraie, un endroit à part hors du temps et du tumulte où pour la première fois j’entends quelqu’un me parler de cette fille, la Fille du Hanh Hoa et c’est pour me dire qu’il l’aime mais qu’il ne va pas l’adopter. Je ne sais plus s’il porte un de ses t-shirts rock ou punk ni s’il a son cuir ou son perfecto sur les épaules mais je sais que je l’écoute et que je le regarde et ce que je n’ai pas oublié, c’est son sourire et son visage – je les revois comme si c’était hier et je me dis que si ce sont mes mots et mon histoire qui déclenchent un tel enthousiasme alors tout est permis. Il faut attendre presque huit ans et cette fois ce n’est pas un espace de verdure mais un SMS, et puis un peu plus tard une autre table avec d’autres chaises et cette fois je me souviens bien de ce qu’on boit. Et je l’entends encore me parler de ces filles, d’autres filles et des hommes qui les ont trahies mais si c’était seulement ça, des histoires de filles, on n’en serait pas là. C’est une illumination et cette illumination j’ai encore envie de la voir sur ce visage, peu importe qui la déclenche et qui l’enclenche, il les mérite ces fulgurances qu’il a en permanence et qui éclairent tous les alentours. Il les mérite et au-delà parce qu’il est le seul à savoir parler comme ça de vos histoires et de vos personnages, et parfois même mieux que vous. Il est le seul et j’ai cette chance là qu’il ait été sur le même chemin que moi, un jour, et qu’il se soit arrêté.

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Photo Catherine Hélie © Éditions Gallimard

© Thomas Bronnec. Titles at Gallimard.

© Translation from the French by Gabriel Valjan

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