Invisible Love (24 page)

I can only see this household as a
ménage à trois
.

 

*

 

Why should there be a hidden explanation—and why only one—for Nissen's attitude toward Mozart? Why should this passion he feels for his wife's first husband have just one dimension: a devotion to genius, homosexual leanings, financial interest, a love triangle, an exploration of his femininity?

What if it was all of these things at the same time?

Literature warns us against simple ideas. In this respect, it is very different than ideology, which tends to seek the elementary beneath plurality.

Ideologists, eager to reduce the multiplicity of appearances to an easily located principle, stop questioning their implicit prejudice: that truth is simple.

But why?

Why shouldn't truth be complex and made up of many causes?

Why should the fantasy of the elementary win the day?

The ideal of simplicity is illuminating at first, but then it blinds us.

As advocates of complexity, novelists discover connections, pushing their investigation as far as it will go, whereas ideologists search in this same diversity to find a foundation.

Ideologists dig, novelists illuminate.

 

*

 

Moralists never make good novelists. When they try, they bring to their reproduction of reality a coldness, a clinical attitude, a dissection of living matter that reeks of the laboratory.

Instead of taking us to a maternity ward, they trap us in a morgue.

That may be interesting, but it's never attractive.

Unless one appreciates the poetry of a forensic pathologist . . .

 

 

* * *

 

 

A journey to Iceland with my mother. The liner slices through the waves, taking us to the land of perpetual daylight.

In this infinity of water and sky, we think about Father, who left us two weeks ago.

We talk about him calmly, tenderly, joyfully, as if he could still hear us.

This cruise was arranged long before he lay dying, but his death was very predictable, coming as it did after years of suffering, and I knew we would make this journey while mourning him.

He himself suspected as much, he hoped it would happen, talked to me about it, entrusted my mother to me for when he was gone. We are happy to grant his wish.

There is a bright, clear, peaceful atmosphere to this journey: is it the light of destiny fulfilled?

 

*

 

I have a short story in my head, one about a transplanted heart, and I decide to set it in Iceland.

I love this country. This is the third time I've been here. Whether in winter or in summer—I think there are only two seasons—I am overwhelmed by that rough volcanic crust rising from the sea. Nature here is not just the flora or fauna, it is the earth, inhabited by violent, dangerous forces, lava capable of tearing open rocks and glaciers. It slumbers, vibrates, boils, cracks, explodes. If you want to experience a land that is alive, even when you can't see plants or animals, go to Iceland.

In this country of basalt and ashes, human beings are a spicy blend of sweet and sour. Crushed as they are by the forces of nature, they demonstrate great humility and solidarity. Was it not here that the world's first parliament assembled in the ninth century?

“A Heart Under Ash” tells the story of a woman who loves her nephew more than her son, developing maternal feelings not for her own child but for her sister's. When her son dies in an accident, she suddenly realizes this and, in order to expiate—or escape—her guilt, she is forced to hate her nephew. Her previous love for him is replaced by an equally strong hate.

Impulsive, accustomed to expressing herself with a paintbrush rather than in words, she is incapable of formulating her emotions and unsuited to introspection. It is better for her not to put her thoughts and attitudes into sentences because, whenever she tries, she gets it wrong. Her husband, for example, into whose arms she throws herself without hesitation, she speaks of with contempt; she describes her beloved sister as a tyrant; she thinks her new friend Vilma is an angel whereas in fact she conceals a devil; as for her son, he was nothing but a list of complaints . . .

If words fail some people, Alba uses them to betray herself.

That means that my story, which is told from Alba's point of view, cannot resort to psychological analysis. It must keep to the facts. It must describe the action as if in a film. Sometimes I have the feeling I'm writing it not with a pen, but with a camera.

 

*

 

Vilma is Alba's double. These two mothers have their grief in common; like many people nowadays, they cannot bear moral pain.

Our preposterous era rejects suffering. After centuries of Christianity, whose emblem is a dying man nailed to a pair of wooden planks, our materialistic world has a tendency to flee Calvary. When we feel sad, we swallow medication, we take drugs, we see a therapist.

As for Vilma and Alba, they act to suppress their affliction.

This desire not to feel anymore will lead them to become monsters. One hopes to steal Jonas, the other to kill him. They kidnap or murder because they do not want to confront their own sense of unease.

To act . . . I have often thought that strong, enterprising, dynamic men who kill themselves when they're about forty or fifty are also men who, accustomed to controlling their own lives, evade suffering with an act—the act of hanging themselves or blowing their brains out.

Suicide out of a desire to act rather than the lessening of desire.

Suicide because of a misunderstanding.

Suicide because they are incapable of facing their own pain.

All wisdom starts with the acceptance of suffering.

 

*

 

In “A Heart Under Ash” I ask the question: What is a person?

Is a part of a person still him? Is my heart, my kidney, my liver still me?

In transplant surgery, organs are regarded as almost interchangeable biological spare parts: when brain death makes a human being lose his overall feeling, he is reduced to a warehouse of these spare parts.

The ego is therefore the living, synchronous totality of the body. All that remains afterwards are the scattered elements that once formed the whole.

Vilma, one of my two heroines, rejects this viewpoint. She regards her daughter's heart as her daughter.

Alba, on the other hand, thinks Thor was destroyed when they removed his heart.

In a way, both challenge death. Vilma denies it, and Alba wants to believe that it could have been avoided.

 

*

 

As a supporter of organ donation, I like the idea that death can be useful.

 

*

 

Death is nothing but a service rendered to life so that it can be renewed and continue.

If the earth were filled with immortals, how would we coexist? We would need to find a way to make room for new generations.

Death is the wisdom of life.

 

*

 

If Romanticism is all about the harmony between nature and human beings, then “A Heart Under Ash” is a Romantic story. The forces of the earth get angry and are unleashed at the same time as my protagonists, then calm down in unison with their hearts.

 

 

* * *

 

 

I am writing the last story in the book, “The Ghost Child.” Or, rather, I am rewriting it, since I already wrote a version of it a few months ago.

That was an unpleasant episode. A newspaper I like very much asked me for a Christmas story. In response, I sent them this story. How embarrassing for them—and then for me. What I had delivered wasn't what they wanted at all. “The Ghost Child” was rather a harsh, uncompromising story, completely lacking in the magical, warmhearted, playful tone required of “a Christmas story.”

The editor's stammered apology over the phone took me completely aback. It had never even occurred to me that something I wrote had to meet seasonal criteria. Once again, I was discovering that I was incapable of practicing journalism and unsuited to working on commission.

The editor had the good grace to search in some of my previous books for a short story that was better suited to “the spirit of Christmas.”

“The Ghost Child” is inspired by my close friends. Out of respect and love for them, I wish both to point that out and to keep silent.

What parent hasn't dreaded the announcement: “Your child will not be normal”? We know some who have embraced this fate, and others who have rejected it. While I praise those who have welcomed a handicapped child, I would never cast a stone at those who have preferred abortion. Often, in fact, it is the same people. I know parents who are raising their sick children alongside other, healthy, ones, while haunted by the ghosts of one or more rejected children.

And I think I know how a friend of mine must feel when he looks at his daughter—lively, pretty, intelligent, and optimistic, although suffering from a rare condition—and thinks of her virtual brothers and sisters that he and his wife once chose not to allow to be born. When he thrills with joy and love for his daughter, he must miss them. When he takes her to hospital for her treatment and worries about new infections, he has to justify that rejection. I am sure he constantly wavers between one and the other, and that this wavering gives him a human depth and density that we admire in him.

 

*

 

Some time ago, I read a scientific article that proved that Chopin did not have tuberculosis, as was thought at the time, but a form of cystic fibrosis, a rare lung disease that had not yet been identified.

It made my head swim.

Knowing that these days reliable genetic tests can detect a great number of illnesses either prior to conception or during pregnancy, I imagined Mr. and Mrs. Chopin being summoned to the hospital and told about their son's breathing difficulties, his reduced life expectancy, the problems he and they would have to face day by day. Maybe the doctor would even make them feel guilty by telling them they would be costing society a lot of money if they let this child be born.

Then Mr. and Mrs. Chopin would give up on little Frédéric, and mankind would be deprived of all that wonderful music that soothes us in our solitude.

 

*

 

Without bringing in that old word “eugenics,” a frightening word that evokes the horrors of the Nazi period, we are moving toward practices that are increasingly unquestioned.

Today, an accountant's mentality is emerging in the field of life. We calculate what this or that illness will cost society. We quibble over access to certain medicines that could give a sick person just a few more months of life, and we reject effective treatments that are too expensive.

In fact, some civil servants have already decided how much a life is worth. The pragmatic British have created NICE—the National Institute for Clinical Excellence—a highly positioned health authority defining the sum that society agrees to pay in treatment and medication for each year of life extended. Take your calculators: it's £40,000 a year. If new treatments exceed this price, Social Security, relying on advice from NICE, refuses to reimburse the cost. This accountant's mentality has spread to Austria and Sweden. Obviously, the various government debt crises are encouraging this development.

Well, not everything that is rational is reasonable.

The economic rationale is no longer reasonable if it attacks human beings, their dignity, their unique, irreplaceable characters.

The economic rationale is no longer reasonable if it gives rise to a barbaric ideology that says some human beings are more important than others.

The economic rationale is no longer reasonable if it forgets the objectives of a society: to ensure the health and security of its members.

By itself, the economic rationale is inhumane.

 

*

 

In “The Ghost Child,” I again reflect on the question of suffering.

Decidedly, it is a question our times can no longer deal with.

Is it possible to suffer and still be happy? Nowadays, most people would say no.

Yet Mélissa, my twenty-year-old heroine, who suffers from a genetic condition, is happy. Even though she often feels faint, even though she has to take a whole cocktail of antibiotics, even though she has to do an hour of respiratory physical therapy every day, she lives, has fun, laughs, loves, admires, and learns. She can save other lives . . . And, one day, give life in her turn . . .

Happiness isn't about hiding from suffering, but about integrating it into the fabric of our existence.

 

*

 

What makes a life worth living?

That question has as many answers as there are individuals on earth.

I will never allow someone to decide for me or for others.

The slightest agreement on this point between two people raises my suspicions. Once there are three, I start seeing dictatorship.

 

 

* * *

 

 

And so the book is finished.

Reading through it, I try to locate the threads that run through it.

The dominant theme is that of a secret architecture. The couple formed by the two men in the title story depends on the official couple of Geneviève and Eddy. Dr. Heymann survives the apocalypse thanks to his complicity with an animal. The duo of Constanze and Georg Nissen is in fact a virtual trio in which Mozart occupies the central place. Alba develops maternal feelings for her nephew, not her son. Séverine and Benjamin strengthen their marriage by rejecting a child, and that child becomes, instead of a means to an end, an end in itself, and idolized as such.

I also see the theme of necessary mediation. In comparing their homosexual couple with a heterosexual one, Jean and Laurent gain a better understanding of their own path, both its achievements and its frustrations. Samuel Heymann learns to love human beings through Argos, and only avoids revenge and achieves forgiveness thanks to the look in the dog's eyes. Nissen's cataloguing and publishing of Mozart's works rescues them from oblivion, and what he loves in his new wife is the composer's former companion. Alba can only understand herself thanks to Vilma's extreme actions and Magnus's reasonable intervention. As for Séverine and Benjamin, they revisit their past when they meet Mélissa, who is an ambiguous figure to them, both a symbol of redemption, since she saves them, and one of revenge, since she makes the abortion they agreed to look like murder. Even as she pulls them from one abyss, she plunges them into another.