Herve Le Tellier - Enough About Love

Anna knows what she wants to talk about, Simon’s eyesight problem. The thought that her brother could one day go blind terrifies her. She talks about Simon’s wife, his children. Eventually, she confesses the fear she would feel if the man she loved could no longer capture her with his gaze, if she disappeared from his view, if that mirror she so needs were broken. The selfishness of this narcissism fills her with shame.

She also wants to talk about a Freudian slip she made the day before. She was out for a walk with Karl and Lea, and Yves was with them, they were all going out for lunch together for the first time. When she is with her children, Yves is never a lover, but a “friend.” Anna has not yet resolved to admit the position he holds in her life, Yves often doubts she ever will. She refrains from any affectionate gestures, any attentiveness. Karl ran on ahead, jumping from one paving stone to another, Lea slipped between the two of them, took one of their hands each and started to swing, screeching happily. The spontaneous affection Lea always shows for Yves unsettles Anna every time: her daughter could be consenting to this unavowed, unacknowledged union, granting her mother’s lover a role. Lea suddenly abandoned them to go look in a toy store window.

“We’re late and we’re hungry,” Anna scolded her. “Come on, Nora, hurry up!” Nora? Anna looked away, disconcerted, then pulled herself together: “Quickly, Lea!”

Nora. She cannot get over it. She called her daughter by her younger sister’s name, she was back in her childhood, in the days when she went for walks with her father, her mother, her sister, and her brothers. Lea did not appear to notice and hurried up.

Anna thought about this slip of the tongue all evening. She found an explanation, has already given it to Yves, and now produces it for Le Gall.

“I just can’t be a mother when I’m with Yves.”

“Mmm. But it wasn’t Yves you were talking to.”

“No.”

“It was to Lea, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So,” he suggests, “it could also be that in front of Lea and Karl, you can’t be a woman. You won’t let yourself.”

Anna stays silent. Le Gall has just inverted her view of the scene, giving the slip the exact opposite meaning. She feels he has pinpointed it.

“Maybe I’m trying to protect them.”

“Or to protect yourself.”

Le Gall rarely intervenes. He does it every time he sees another plausible and equally productive association. He tries to banish the word “because” from his vocabulary. It is not up to him to determine what is cause and what is effect. He limits himself merely to stating facts. Sometimes, all he does is reiterate what has been said. During one session, she blurted, “If I stay with Yves, I’ll have the life I’m dreaming of.”

Thomas repeated this: “Yes. The life you’re dreaming of. You’re dreaming.”

“Stan made me a mother,” she told Le Gall, “Yves made me a woman.”

Le Gall calls this formulization: a technique for turning life into aphorisms, for fixing it in words. It has its uses. Anna so likes “finding the words.” But does finding the words mean understanding? Animals do not need words. Thomas Le Gall sometimes has his doubts about the philosophy of language, but having doubts about philosophy — whether or not it has to do with language — surely that in itself is truly philosophy?

• •

C ORPORATE SPONSORSHIP improves a company’s image, and the cost is tax-deductible. These two reasons explain why a water treatment corporation has raised the Pension Heisberg (what was once a private house, in the Marais district of Paris) to the ranks of a cultural venue. It finances concerts, discussions, and exhibitions there. On this particular evening, the Heisberg’s auditorium is playing host to three writers for a joint reading, on the politically correct theme of Foreignness. Their three original texts were specially commissioned and have been published as a limited edition by Carnets Heisberg, printed in twelve-point type on laid paper.

Stan is late, he had an emergency keratitis. He has not been to a reading for a long time, but the children are with their grandparents for the night, Anna has gone to the rue de Verneuil for her psychoanalysis seminar, and curiosity got the better of him. He locked his bike close to the Picasso Museum and ran all the way to the Heisberg. The young blonde in glasses sitting at the small book table replies almost in a whisper: “Yes, sir, it’s started. Yes, there are a few seats left. No, Yves Janvier hasn’t done his reading yet, he’s the last. You can slip in quietly through the upstairs door.”

The audience is applauding. Stan opens the door and sits down quickly, right at the back of the auditorium. There is a man standing onstage, it is Janvier, he reads:

1. Hello. This text is called Foreign News, although the concept of news may be completely foreign to it. 2. Foreign News comprises seventy-eight entries, which is a reasonable and well-reasoned number, and is written to respect the constraint that every sentence will include the word foreign or foreigner. 3. In some cases the word could refer to a female foreigner. 4. It could also be in the plural, in which case it will be “foreigners” with an s . 5. Anyone who fails to put an s at the end of a plural word has a good chance of being one of these foreigners. 6. We will, therefore, see “foreign” the adjective and “foreigner” the noun, but there is absolutely no related verb. 7. If there were a verb “to foreign,” it would be conjugated thus: I foreign, you foreign, he foreigns, etc. 8. What could you foreign? I have no idea. 9. Besides, why should the verb be transitive? But to foreign oneself sounds embarrassingly like to fondle oneself. 10. In Exodus (23:9) it says: “Also thou shalt not oppress a foreigner: for ye know the heart of a foreigner, seeing ye were foreigners in the land of Egypt.” 11. One last quote: “I am man, and nothing human is foreign to me.” This is from Terence (185–159 BC); I copied it out into a little yellow notebook when I was thirteen years old. 12. The thirteen-year-old boy I was then would probably listen to what I am saying now and think I was speaking a foreign language. 13. I’m sure he would be terrified if you told him that in thirty-seven years’ time he would be the one speaking that foreign language. 14. Perhaps I would think he spoke a foreign language too (sorry, another quote, this time from L. P. Hartley’s Go Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”). 26. The word “Mobutu” means foreigner in Lingala. 27. Marshall Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, dictator of Congo-Kinshasa (and then Zaire) from 1965 to 1997, is therefore General Foreigner. 28. There is also the notion of a Foreign Body. 29. In a poem that refers to “two straight-edged red holes,” one is likely to find two foreign bodies inside the individual concerned (a young soldier without a helmet). 30. Similarly, the glasses I am wearing are a foreign body. 31. But the world would feel far more foreign to me without them. 32. Our bodies harbor a great many foreign bodies: bacteria, viruses, and intestinal flora. They constitute the same volume as a tennis ball. 33. These foreign bodies are our best friends, unlike cancer, which is a little bit of ourselves with a distorted growth rate. 34. A foreigner can be our friend while an intimate acquaintance may be our enemy. 35. If redder means more red then why doesn’t foreigner mean more foreign? 36. Try explaining that to a foreigner. 37. Well, to a foreigner who speaks a foreign language, because some foreigners don’t speak a foreign language. 38. We can feel closer to some foreigners who speak a foreign language than to certain people who speak our language and are not foreigners. 39. It is sometimes said that speaking foreign languages means you can never be a foreigner. 40. Nothing could be further from the truth: I speak English and feel like a foreigner in London, but don’t speak Italian and feel completely at home in Milan. 41. I’ve always been amazed by the idea that, by taking one step on a mountain peak in the Alps, I can be in a foreign country. 42. But I’m even more astonished that when you cross a border, in the space of a few feet, children start talking a foreign language. 43. I sometimes even feel like a foreigner in my own country. 44. I should probably get used to thinking of the French as foreigners. 45. Who can claim to have an ounce of patriotism left when they come across badly behaved compatriots in a foreign country, and feel ashamed of them? 46. Whichever country you come from, the world still has many more foreigners. 47. I will go one stage further: for some people, the whole world is made up of foreigners. It is if you live in Luxembourg: if you get two people from Luxembourg on the same flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, they will be from the same family. 48. Other nations are barely aware foreigners exist. That is certainly the case for Americans, those foreigners who don’t even have real names, as Godard would say. 49. The only foreign words that Americans (at least the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant population) know seem to be related to food or clichéd expressions like la vie en rose . 50. We should be grateful that foreign words dominate some areas: we are happy to talk about Microsoft in French, it just feels like a name to us, but if you put the word into French, it sounds very limp and unattractive. 51. In the United States, foreign films get their own category. Billy Wilder was cruel enough to say, “Let’s shoot a few scenes that are completely beside the point. I want to win the Oscar for the best foreign film.” 52. Hearing a French word used in a foreign language does not make the language feel any less foreign to me, but makes the word feel more foreign in French: déjà vu in English or fauteuil in German. 53. A foreign language may have a completely different concept of foreignness. 54. The French word for foreigner, étranger , is related to the English word “stranger,” with the accent on that first e representing the long-lost s of the original French word, estranger . 55. But when Sinatra sang about “Strangers in the Night” we all know he was not talking about foreigners. 56. An English stranger is therefore less foreign than a French étranger . 57. In English, you need the word “foreigner” to mean someone from another country. 58. For the one French word, you get two English ones to express degrees of foreignness: the stranger being someone you don’t know and the foreigner being someone from a foreign country. 59. There is also the word “outsider,” which was used to translate Camus’s title L’étranger , because the words “stranger” and “foreigner” did not quite fit the bill. 60. Then there is the word “alien,” which does not necessarily mean flesh-eating extraterrestrials with antennae; it actually simply means a foreigner: “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m an alien in New York,” Sting sings. 61. Four English words for the one French one: that gives you some idea how different foreign languages can be. 62. To a man, women can feel completely foreign. 63. As you get to know a woman, she becomes familiar, less foreign. 64. I sometimes wish the women in my life had stayed a bit more foreign. 65 …