Who You Think I Am Read online

  Also by Camille Laurens

  In His Arms

  Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, 2016

  Originally published in France as Celle que vous croyez

  by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, in 2016.

  English translation copyright © Other Press, 2017

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Laurens, Camille, author.

  Title: Who you think I am / Camille Laurens; translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.

  Other titles: Celle que vous croyez. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, 2017. | “Originally published in France as Celle que vous croyez by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, in 2016”—Verso title page.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016036970 (print) | LCCN 2016047623 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590518328 (paperback) | ISBN 9781590518335 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Middle-aged women—Fiction. | Self-presentation—Fiction. | Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. | Virtual reality—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PQ2672.A78365 C4513 2017 (print) | LCC PQ2672. A78365 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016036970

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook ISBN 9781590518335

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Camille Laurens

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  I: Go Die!

  1: INTERVIEWS WITH DR. MARC B.

  2: HEARING OF DR. MARC B.

  II: A Personal Story

  3: ROUGH DRAFT OF A LETTER TO LOUIS O.

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Notes

  About the Author

  prologue

  AUDIO RECORDING. DEPOSITION NO. 453 AJ (POLICE HEADQUARTERS ARCHIVES, R.)

  I’d been talking to him for twenty minutes he was saying something about an article I’d written he’d written a piece on the same subject I kind of liked his green eyes his black hair I felt like burying my way into that black hair there were white patches on the sides grayish-white hairs burying myself in it burrowing my whole face in there touching it feeling how thick it was smelling it and then his voice suddenly changed it became really gentle it sounded so tender laden with smoothness or with smooth attentiveness he was replying to yes to a student she came in to ask him a question a young brunette with a pink scarf she asked him something and he turned his back to me just like that without a word with no apology I no longer existed just like that without a would you excuse me a could I have a minute I was left on my own idiotic useless no apology with my smile left dangling I could see it I could see my mouth smiling my stupid red mouth they look at their teeth like with horses they prod their breasts and asses you do know they hanged that woman she’d killed the man who raped her they hanged her they’re killing us it’s pure hate you know it’s pure hate listen it was in the paper I cut it out listen look I’ve pinned it to my coat there can you see:

  The rates are written on a notice posted up near the entrance to markets: Little girl aged 1–9: 200,000 dinars ($153) Girl aged 10–20: 150,000 dinars ($116) Woman aged 20–30: 100,000 dinars ($77) Woman aged 30–40: 75,000 dinars ($58) Woman aged 40–50: 50,000 dinars ($39)

  Trading in women they sell them but read what it says:

  men laughing…amused buyers…Women over the age of 50 are not marketed, as they are unfit for purpose. Besides, the price would not justify the cost of feeding them and transporting them to the market from wherever they were captured. The lucky ones converted to Islam, the rest, the majority, had their throats slit

  no I won’t calm down they sell us they kill us they liquidate us it’s all in the newspaper it depends what sort of paper you read you’re men too it’s your job it’s your hit so then they say that minister Macron it’s gross his wife is twenty years older than him everyone laughs about it you really have to be lame a loser a wimp or maybe she’s a pedophile people say it’s disgusting what a shocking relationship women giggle about it too they laugh about their own impending death these women they’re the living dead a few more corpses they don’t realize they even kill us the minute we’re born and not just in China and India here when you’re born “What is it? It’s a girl” and you’re suddenly worthless Moscovici has a wife thirty years his junior “Beauty and the Minister” run the headlines in the papers while with Macron it’s “The Seducer of Crones” no one loves us no one it’s horrible you can see it in the street you can feel it you’re old people look right through me or criticize me get out of here you stink of death you smell moldy have you seen Madonna people hate her for “still wanting to be someone” that’s it those are the very words I read in the paper a real newspaper a serious daily “it’s pathetic that aged 50 Madonna still wants to be someone” what should we be doing then should we want to stop existing altogether should we withdraw from who we are accept we don’t belong here anymore there isn’t room for us there isn’t room for me now I don’t know where to put myself a drawer a coffin get in your box there’s no point being young if you’re not pretty and no point being pretty if you’re not young men mature women age a man in the twilight of his life is a handsome thing a woman’s just sad let them put you in a coffin so transparent I’m transparent my father’s a glazer you need to disappear okay get it scram you’re in the way get out of my face go die someplace

  I

  go die!

  Go, cruel heart, go die, you never loved me!

  —PIERRE CORNEILLE

  In some cases when a love cannot happen it consumes the soul.

  —PASAL QUIGNARD

  1

  INTERVIEWS WITH DR. MARC B.

  Claire

  I’ve already told the whole story ten times to the people you work with, you could just read my file.

  I know you’re new, I can see that for myself. Is this your first job? Because you must be only thirty, at the very most.

  You don’t look it.

  I’m laughing because here I am reciting Marivaux to you and you have no idea. Have they still not put literature on the curriculum in this place?

  You can tell from, I don’t know, the rhythm, the intonation. It’s your job to hear how things sound. To spot anything that doesn’t ring true. Ding dong. Cuckoo! Hmm, yes, completely cuckoo.

  Araminte. The beautiful widow. And we don’t know whether her young steward wants to seduce her because he loves her or because she’s rich. Whether he’s sincere even though he’s manipulating her. But you’re no Dorante, I’m guessing you’re not here because you have any plans to marry me?

  I’ve done a bit of acting, yes, in my day—it was a long time ago. My husband was a director—well, is. He carried on. We were students when we met, we were in the university theater
group. It seems such a long time ago. And yet, d’you know, I still remember some of my lines by heart. I’ve also learned a bit about staging a performance, haven’t I? But let’s not go back to the flood of tears. Anyway, it’s all been written up in there, in your paperwork. What more do you want?

  You need to understand? Oh, I understand that! But what exactly do you want to understand?

  Well, that’s a hell of an answer. You score a point. What’s your name?

  Marc. Marc. I like you, Marc, and I agree with you: there are only two interesting people in each of us, the one who wants to kill and the one who wants to die. They’re not equally well represented, but when you’ve identified them both you can say you’ve gotten to know someone. It’s often too late.

  How did we end up here? We? Kind of you to include yourself in this disaster, when you’ve only just turned up. No one can blame you for the situation I’m in, I’ve “ended up in,” if I can actually be said to have moved in the last two, um, three years—is it two and a half years?—that I’ve been here. Or maybe when you say “we” you mean a more general they-we-you? Us all? We, the institution. We, the specialists. We, society. How did we manage to get into a situation where this woman here present is still living at public expense, where she hasn’t accepted her duties, her obligations, her productivity, or should that be reproductivity? So that in her later years she’ll be fed, housed, cared for, and given medical care by us rather than doing what she’s certainly still capable of doing for the community? Where did we fuck up? Is that your question?

  I taught. Pretty taut I got too, sometimes.

  At university, yes, comparative literature. Senior lecturer. I was about to get my professorship. This they-we-you of yours were about to promote me, to allow me into the wonderful world of mandarins. At forty-seven, they-we-you could say that I was a role model for women, you know there’s still a ridiculously low proportion of women in higher positions. And then bang! What a drag! They lock me up, they cross-examine me, and, till now, they keep me here. Will you keep me here, Marc? Will you keep me near you? I’m useless here, I’m not making my contribution to society. I’m deceased in the purest sense of the word, I’ve ceased to be. Yes, that’s it, I’m no longer operational, I’ve blown a fuse, if you like, or blown a gasket, tripped a switch, and whee! I’ve spun out of control, I’m effectively dead and it’s your job to resuscitate me, to rewire my circuits, get the machine working again and basically reinstate me. That is what you do, isn’t it?—reinstate people. You want the deceased to function again. Which reminds me, there’s something I wanted to tell you: you summoned me this mor—What is it? You don’t like “summoned”? Okay. You invited me here this morning, it’s eleven o’clock, I’m telling you that for future reference, if there is to be any future reference, I’m not really a morning person, not very operational, I can’t get up, I’m knocked out by the Valium from the previous evening, and not yet soothed by the daily Xanax, and anyway quite often (this is a secret, don’t tell anyone), quite often I don’t take it, I’d rather be anxious than oblivious, if you’re unhappy it’s better to know you are, wouldn’t you say?

  In the early days it had nothing to do with Chris—with Christophe—because I’m guessing it’s Christophe you want me to talk about? The corpus delicti or rather the corpus so absolutely delectable he broke my heart. Or would you prefer me to talk about my childhood, my parents, my family—the whole shebang?

  It wasn’t Chris I was trying to get to at all, at first. I didn’t know him, I wasn’t interested in him. I asked him to be my friend on Facebook just to have news of Joe—Joel. I was going out with Joel, with Joe, at the time. In those days Joe had hardly any friends on social networks, he only accepted people he knew, except me—he thought lovers shouldn’t be friends. But Chris (and it was Joe who told me this), well, Chris had hundreds of friends, he did a lot of Facebooking, his profile name was KissChris, he had this way of collecting likes so easily it impressed Joe. Are you on Facebook, Marc? You do understand what I’m talking about? You don’t need me to translate?

  Anyone who’s been around Joe for a while might think it was weird for him to be shy like that because in other ways he had no boundaries, I mean really none—hardly even the one that would stop you killing someone outright if you got the urge, and even then…there are so many ways of killing someone. He could destroy you in a flash, with one word, with his silence. You must know that women’s main fear is abandonment? Yes, you have stuff like that in your books. Well, Joe was like that—I guess you could say “perverse”: he could abandon you ten times a day. He knew where the crack in your armor was—in a way, perverts know women best of all—and he would wedge the tip of his absence in there and just drain your vital energy, your thirst for happiness. You could reach out your hand to him, he’d squeeze it then drop it, on a whim, for no apparent reason, just because you were relying on him, you were relaxing into a feeling of trust. Toward the end I stopped telling him what I liked, I didn’t let him know what made me happy because he would have gone to considerable lengths to avoid it or to make sure it didn’t happen. When I couldn’t take any more I’d leave him, but I never got out completely. And he’d come back all sugary sweet or I’d call him back all honeyed words and the cycle started again, month after month. Don’t ask me why. I’d just separated from my husband, I didn’t want to be alone, I needed love, or at least to make love, to talk about it, believe in it, well, you must know that song, everyone wants to live, do we need to say why?

  No, never. Joe never hurt me physically. It wasn’t worth it. Physical cruelty’s a last resort, thumping someone in the face is for beginners.

  Hard to say. Desire works in mysterious ways. You want something from the other person that you yourself don’t have or no longer have. Before I would have said you always want the same thing—a good deep-seated thing from the past, even if it’s harmful. Rekindling heartache. Refueling the flamethrower. But since this relationship, I’m not so sure. I’ve come to think desire might be able to change, that you could uproot it, plant it into new, softer, more accommodating soil. At least try. If everything’s written in advance, that would be too sad, I thought. If the die is cast what’s the point trying to change the numbers?

  Yes. So it was during one of our long breaks, I just couldn’t take not knowing where Joe was any longer—because he could vanish, completely vanish—I set up a fake Facebook profile. Till then I’d hardly used it, I had a profile with my real name, Claire Millecam, it was for work, I exchanged information with foreign academics or former students, every now and then, no great shakes. Then I fell into the trap. For people like me who are terrified of being abandoned—that’s what you’ve got written there, haven’t you, terrified of being abandoned? Basically a bit like a food allergy: too much abandonment and I’m heading for anaphylactic shock, I suffocate and die—for people like me the Internet is the shipwreck as well as the life raft: you drown in the tracking game, in the expectation, you can’t grieve for a relationship, however dead it may be, and at the same time you’re hovering above it in a virtual world, clinging to fake information that pops up all over the Web, and instead of falling apart you go online. If only for that little green light that tells you the other person’s online. Ah, that little green light, what a comfort! I remember that. Even if the other person ignores you, you know where they are: he’s there on your screen, he’s sort of grounded in time and space. Especially if next to the green light it says “Web”: then you can imagine him at home, sitting at his computer, you have a mooring in the wild sea of possibilities. What makes you more anxious is when the green light says “mobile.” Mobile, don’t you see?! Mobile means on the move, roaming, free! By definition, harder to situate. He could be anywhere with his phone. Still, you know what he’s doing, or at least you feel you do—and this creates a sort of proximity which has a calming effect. You reckon that if he was enjoying what he was doing he wouldn’t be going online every ten minutes. Maybe he’s watching you
too, hiding behind the wall and watching what you’re doing? Kids spying on each other. You listen to the same songs as him, almost in real time, you live together through music, you even dance to the same songs that get him tapping his feet. And when he’s not there, you have a record of when he was last online. You know what time he woke up, for example, because looking at his wall seems to be the first thing he does. At what point in the day he laid eyes on a photo he commented on. Whether he woke in the middle of the night. He doesn’t even need to say so. Basically, you’re stitching this together as you go along: you embroider over the gaps, like darning socks. There’s a good reason for calling it the Web. One minute you’re a spider, the next you’re a fly. But you exist for each other, thanks to each other, connected by a shared religion. Not exactly taking communion, but communing.

  Of course it hurts too, of course it does: the other person’s online, but not with you. You can imagine all sorts of things, you do imagine all sorts of things, you look at his new friends’ profiles—both male and female—looking for a revelation in someone’s posts; you decipher the tiniest comment, you keep cutting from one wall to another, you play back the songs he’s listened to, read meaning into the lyrics, learn about what he likes, view his photos and videos, keep an eye on his geo-location, the events he’s going to, you navigate like a submarine through an ocean of faces and words. Sometimes it takes your breath away, you stand there holding your breath on the edge of this abyss to which you’ve been relegated. But it’s not as painful as knowing nothing, nothing at all, being cut off. “I know where you are”: I needed those words in order to live, do you understand? It’s like that epitaph on an American’s tomb at Père-Lachaise cemetery—I used to love strolling around there. His wife had had this engraved: “Henry, at last I know where you’re sleeping tonight.” Wonderful, isn’t it?! Facebook’s a bit like that: okay, so the other person’s alive, but he’s assigned a location, he’s not entirely free, he’s on known territory, even if it isn’t conquered territory. So that little green light kept me alive like a drip, a lungful of Ventolin, I could breathe easier. And at night it was sometimes my guiding star. I don’t have to explain that. It’s a statement of fact. I had a bearing in the middle of the desert, a reference point. Without it I’d be dead. D’you understand? Dead.