• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 852 0

for not having noticed this, for never asking you about it, for thinking this was normal. I thought of my own mother, such a charming woman, more like Romain Gary’s mother or Albert Cohen’s. I realized how lucky it is—if not for a writer, then at least for a man—to be blessed with a mother of this kind. I tried to put myself in your shoes, to imagine the effect of having this block of violence and hatred at your origin. I thought about calling you. That’s not one of our habits. But I felt like calling you. Just like that. For no reason. Just to hear your news, chat, tell from your voice how you’re getting through this earthquake, so intimate yet public. But then, it was late. In fact, with the time difference, it was very late. I didn’t do it. And here I am writing to you. This is what I feel like writing to you. This story is so staggering, so unprecedented, this Oedipal murder in reverse and put on display is so unheard of, that I prefer to forget about Comte, Kant, Althusser, the misanthropic generation, Karl Kraus and really let you talk. In chess, that’s what’s called a waiting move.

*Mr. Arkadin: film by Orson Welles in which the hero pretends to suffer from amnesia and employs someone to investigate his past with a view to locating and killing anyone who knows about his former criminal activities.

*Judtschen: later Kanthausen, now Veselovka, Russia. Gumbinnen: later East Prussia, now Gusev, Russia. Osterode (am Harz), Germany.

*Folcoche (translated as Viper in the Fist): novel by Hervé Bazin portraying the hate-filled relationship between a mother nicknamed Folcoche (from folle, “crazy,” and cochonne, “pig”) and her children, inspired by the author’s own childhood conflicts with his mother.

†François Mauriac’s novel Génitrix, in which a middle-aged man makes an unhappy marriage in order to escape his domineering mother.

‡Name of Charles Baudelaire’s mother after she remarried. She is usually criticized for failing to appreciate her son’s genius.

May 8, 2008

It’s true that talking about Comte or Althusser these days seems faintly ridiculous to me; worse still, it seems slightly frightening, like the people who count telegraph poles as they’re driving to the hospital trying to forget the fact that their wife has just died, and then spend the rest of their lives counting the slats of the venetian blinds in their nursing home, the tiles in their bathroom … It frightens me because I have witnessed this mechanical intellectual activity that the brain becomes engrossed in in order to repress the central horror; I have witnessed it in old people but I know that it also happens to younger people.

Almost exactly a week ago, my dog, having set out on his own, came back from a walk in a pitiful state; I don’t know how he managed to crawl as far as the door, because his hindquarters were paralyzed and his paws very painful. He was vomiting a lot. He spent several days at the clinic, where the vet gave him cortisone, unsure whether to perform surgery.

At the same time rumors started to circulate, then there were articles on the Internet, about my mother’s book.

I started to get oozing red spots all over my forearms and my legs.

Today my dog is back from the clinic, he is sleeping a lot; from time to time he opens his eyes and looks at me. For the time being, the vet has advised complete rest. I hope that he will completely recover but I’m not sure. I could say much the same thing about myself.

You’re right, dear Bernard-Henri, to note that the affair of the “now famous Lucie Ceccaldi,” as you call her, evokes a maleficence greater than that of bad mothers in modern literature; of course it is possible to cite repulsive creatures from the darkest depths of Greek mythology. Others might think of the monstrous Baba Yaga in Slavic folklore, who smashes the skulls of newborns to feed on their brains. There are a number of similar tales among African tribes too. The same things must exist in most cultures as long as you go back to the point before patriarchy took over, where the right of life and death over