Concerto to the Memory of an Angel (18 page)

Simplistic: ignoring complexity.

Simplicity: difficulties resolved.

 

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I heard a lovely story in Verona.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a gardener was appointed to look after the cemetery containing Juliet's mausoleum. Tourists came to see her grave, lovers to kiss, and those who were sad, to cry. Moved by these scenes he witnessed on a daily basis, the gardener trained birds so that he could order them to go and land on the shoulders of those troubled souls and then give them a kiss, a furtive little peck with their beak. This was a pleasing phenomenon and gradually letters began to arrive from the world over to ask Juliet for advice in love.

The gardener got into the habit of replying, in his elegant style, and signing Juliet.

When he died, in the 1950s, the envelopes continued to pile up, at the address consisting of nothing more than, “Juliet, Verona, Italy.” A number of Veronese decided to continue the practice and they founded the Juliet Club, a group of seven women who write letters in response to the unhappy or lonely hearts who contact them with their problems.

Yesterday evening I met the seven present-day Juliets—intellectuals, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers—who correspond with prisoners on death row in Texas or lighthouse keepers in China . . .

Strange Verona, built by the Italians and made famous by Shakespeare, an Englishman . . .

 

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As usual, I have no life. My writing has taken over and put everything irrelevant on hold. I am now between parentheses, reduced to being a scribe, a hand in the service of an urgent impulse: characters who want to exist, a story that wants to find its words.

I go through the December holidays like a ghost. My obsession grants me a few hours of respite when I can have a sincere exchange with my parents, my sister, her husband, my nephews, and then as soon as I leave the room, the work in progress takes hold of me once again.

Sometimes I tell myself that writing does not like my family or my friends. Like an intransigent mistress, it isolates me, tears me away from them.

That is probably why I insert the people who are close to me into the writing process. I think about them, about how they will read me in the future, I try to surprise them, to amuse them, I make bets on what each of them will like or dislike on a given page. I insert them as potential readers of the text I am writing.

But as soon as I am sitting opposite them I am no longer there. I pretend to be myself and I remember that they are who they are.

 

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A short story is the working drawing of a novel, a novel reduced to the essential.

It is a demanding genre, and does not forgive betrayal.

While a novel can be used as a junk room, this is impossible for a short story. The space granted to description, dialogue, or sequence must be measured. The slightest error of architecture will show through. As will complacency.

Sometimes I think that the reason I can blossom through the short story is because I am first and foremost a man of the theatre.

We have known ever since Chekhov, Pirandello, and Tennessee Williams that the short story form suits playwrights. Why? The short story writer has the feeling he is directing the reader: he grabs him by the first sentence to lead him to the last, without stopping, without a pause, just as he is accustomed to doing at the theatre.

Playwrights like the short story because they feel it restricts the readers' freedom, converting them into spectators who can no longer leave the theatre, unless they leave their seats for good. The short story restores this power to the writer, the power of governing time, creating a drama, expectancy, and surprises, pulling the strings of emotion and intelligence and then suddenly closing the curtain.

Its brevity places the short story on the same level as music or drama: an art of time. The time it takes to read—like that of listening or watching a spectacle—is regulated by the creator.

Brevity holds one captive to reading.

 

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I am sensitive to one thing I don't often hear people discuss: the proper length of a book.

As a reader, I have found that most of the books I read are not the right length: this one might be three hundred pages whereas the subject only requires a hundred; that one is limited to one hundred and twenty when in fact it needs five hundred. Why has literary criticism consistently overlooked this criterion? As a rule it goes no further than pointing out passages that are overlong, but only when it is blatantly obvious.

This lapse is all the more surprising in that, where the other arts are concerned, careful measures are taken to ensure the harmonious correspondence between content and form. In sculpture, people would generally be surprised if the artist were to chisel a monumental ensemble from a small stone, or shape a daisy from a granite block six meters high; in painting, the relation between frame, size, and subject are always respected; in music, one might consider this or that musical material to be insufficient for the length of this or that piece. In literature, never.

I am convinced that every story has its own density, requiring an appropriate writing format.

Many novels are little more than a recipe for some sort of swindle of a dish—skylark pâté for example: one part horse to one part skylark, in other words, more stuffing than pure substance. Very often this is done to pad out a story, endless descriptions turning into a bailiff's inventory, dialogues that imitate life and destroy style, theories that are arbitrarily recycled, adventures multiplying like cancer.

When a New York publishing house brought out
Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran
in the United States, one of the editors asked me whether I could not rewrite this eighty page novella and stretch it out to a minimum of three hundred and fifty pages, by filling out the stories of Madame Ibrahim, and Momo's parents and grandparents and schoolmates . . .

 

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“Concerto to the Memory of an Angel.”

I am writing it to the music of Alban Berg, which enchants me and procures unexpected sensations and new ideas.

For example, I had never noticed how much age can set us free. At twenty, we are the product of our education but at forty we are, at last, the result of our own choices—if we have made any.

The young man becomes the adult his childhood wanted him to become. Whereas the mature man is the child of that young man.

 

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Can we change? And, above all, can we change voluntarily?

Here I am again, in the thick of these stories, confronted with the problem of freedom . . .

For the partisans of determinism, clearly man does not change, because he has no autonomy, no free will. Will is an illusion, and is only the name given to the most recent perceived conditioning. If an individual changes, it is from the effect of new coercive forces—social training—or a traumatic experience. Except in the case of an intimate wearing down of the machine, this comes from the outside . . .

For those who believe in freedom, the matter is more complicated. Is our will powerful enough to alter our temperament?

For certain people it is, those ambitious sorts whom I call the
partisans of sainthood.
Whether they are Jews, or Buddhists, or Christians, or even atheists like Sartre (who in
The Devil and the Good Lord
gives us a hero, Goetz, who alters radically from evil to good), they believe in our absolute power to achieve metamorphosis.

Then for others, the answer is no, for those cautious sorts whom I call the
repairmen.
Man does not change: he corrects himself. He uses his temperament in another way, he reorients it, places it at the service of other values. Chris, for example, the hero of “Concerto to the Memory of an Angel,” grew up in a cult of competition, a dream of excellence, influenced by a mother who was unhappy and frustrated. After he nearly committed murder, in a state of shock, he preserved his character—energetic, combative, eager for success—but placed it at the service of good. He remains the same, even though the light he places upon himself is different: he has substituted an altruistic lightbulb for the individualistic one.

 

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The force of will.

Without it, we would all have yielded to violent impulses. Who, when suddenly overcome by anger, fear, rage, has not desired, for a split second, to strike or even kill another person?

Sometimes I think that we are all murderers. The majority of humankind, the one which exerts self-control, is made up of imaginary murderers; the minority, of real assassins.

 

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Marguerite Yourcenar said, “One does not change, one becomes deeper.” Likewise, André Gide's advice was to follow one's path, provided it lay uphill.

When will connects with intelligence, man becomes an animal one can easily associate with.

 

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Bruno and Yann have read “Concerto to the Memory of an Angel.” They come back to me, moved, and tell me I have written a beautiful love story.

I'm astonished. I hadn't realized.

 

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“Love in the Elysée Palace.”

When I'm working on this fable of love that is out of sync, I almost feel like I'm at the theatre. Henri and Catherine are strong characters, spectacular from the start. Virtuoso performers of appearance, they wear any number of masks, and have the richness of people who control themselves, and the suffering of those who keep silent.

At the same time, the story's setting can lay traps: the Elysée must remain in the background, power must be a mere framework justifying the fact that those who live there fear public opinion.

I was obliged to write the beginning several times to find the right angle, the one—a very simple one—that allows us to sympathize with an isolated woman who feels abandoned.

 

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If this story, “Love in the Elysée Palace,” is the final story in the book, it is because it holds the keys: like Henri and Catherine, people get lost in the corridors of time, they almost never experience the same feelings simultaneously, but they suffer from these painful time-lags.

Just as the murderess and her priest miss each other . . .

And Greg the sailor forgets to be a father when his children are still children.

And Chris and Axel are too different from each other to form a friendship; and when they change, it is symmetrically, which leaves them exactly the same distance apart . . .

When the day comes where explanations enable us to understand what we have missed, we find that those explanations still cannot repair the loss.

The redemption that flows from our realization often comes too late. Evil has been done . . . Making amends cannot undo what has been done. The daughters of Greg the ship's engineer will always suffer from the fact they were ignored and badly loved . . .

I could have called this book
The Time-lags of Love.

 

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Rita, the Madonna of lost causes, saint of the impossible, shines in these stories like a multifaceted diamond. Sometimes her brilliance is ironical, sometimes it triggers something, sometimes it is cynical, and sometimes hopeful. Its recurrence has the ambiguity of goodness: what appears good to one individual provokes the misfortune of another; what dooms Peter will save Paul.

Saint Rita tells no stories, but through her, stories are told.

This leitmotif is not meant to be an explanation on the part of the writer, myself, but rather a dig, a provocation, a mysterious kernel that will force the reader to think.

This morning I received letters from some German high school students who had studied
Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran
. Amidst their compliments, one of them did complain: “Why don't you tell us why Monsieur Ibrahim keeps saying, ‘I know what is in my Koran'?”

I answered him with one sentence:

“Because I want you to find out for yourself . . . ”

 

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Once a book is finished, its life begins.

As of this evening, I am no longer the author. The authors, henceforth, will be my readers . . .

Voltaire said that the best books are the ones that are half written by a reader's imagination.

I adhere to his idea, but deep inside, I always feel like adding, “provided the reader has some talent . . . ”

 

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To be precise: the idea that the reader may be more talented than I am doesn't bother me a bit. On the contrary . . .