Lançon Philippe - Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo

Some given names have been changed, as few as possible.

T he evening before the attack, I went to the theater with Nina. We were going to the Quartiers dIvry theater on the outskirts of Paris to see Twelfth Night, a play by Shakespeare I hadnt seen or couldnt remember. The director was a friend of Ninas. I didnt know him and was completely unfamiliar with his work. Nina had insisted that I accompany her. She was happy to bring together two people she liked, a director and a journalist. I went along, relaxed and carefree. No article was foreseenwhich is always the best way to end up writing one, out of enthusiasm and, in a way, by surprise. In such cases, the young man who used to go to the theater meets the journalist he has become. After a moment, more or less prolonged, of hesitation, timidity, and feeling each other out, the young man communicates to the journalist his spontaneity, uncertainty, and virginity, then leaves the room so that the other, pen in hand, can go back to doing his job and, unfortunately, to being serious.

I dont specialize in theater, though Ive always liked it. I havent ever spent five or six evenings a week going to plays, and I dont think Im a genuine critic. I started out as a reporter. I became a critic by accident; I remained one by habit and perhaps by carelessness. Criticism has allowed me to comprehendor try to comprehendwhat I saw and to give it an ephemeral form by writing about it. Its the result of an experience that is at once superficial (I dont have the credentials necessary to arrive at a sound judgment of the works concerned) and internal (I cant read or see anything without filtering it through a set of images and associations of ideas that nothing outside me justifies). The day I understood that, I think I felt freer.

Does criticism allow me to combat forgetting? Of course not. Ive seen many plays and read many books that I dont remember, even after writing an article about them, probably because they didnt elicit any image, any genuine emotion. Worse yet: I often forget what I wrote about them. When one of these spectral articles happens to resurface, Im always a bit scared, as if it had been written by another person who bears my name, a usurper. Then I wonder whether I didnt write it to forget, as soon as possible, what I had seen or read, like people who keep a diary to empty their memory daily of what they have experienced. At least I did until January 7, 2015.

During the performance, I took out my notebook. The last words I scrawled that evening, in the dark, were by Shakespeare: Nothing that is so, is so. The following words are in Spanish, scribbled in much larger letters but just as badly. They were written three days later, in a different kind of obscurity, at the hospital. They are addressed to Gabriela, my Chilean friend, the woman I was in love with: Habl con el mdico. Un ao para recuperar. Paciencia! A year to recuperate? Nothing you are told is so when you enter the world where what is so can no longer be truly expressed.

I had known Nina for a little less than two years. Wed met at a party, during the summer, in the garden of a chteau in the Lubron. It took me some time to understand the source of the affinity that she immediately inspired in me. She was a born go-between, sensitive and unaffected. She had the simplicity, the tenderness, the warmth that lead us to mix our friends, as if their qualities, by rubbing against one another, might grow greater. She took pleasure in the sparks, but was too modest to boast about them. She was almost self-effacing, like a discreet, sarcastic, and benevolent mother. When I saw her, I always felt like a fledgling she had hatched who was returning to the nest from which, by imprudence or carelessness, I had fallen. The sadness or concern that floated in her dark, lively eyes disappeared as soon as one began to talk with her. I had not always behaved well toward her. She had resented it, then ceased to resent it. She had less rancor than generosity.

She and I spent an evening together from time to time, including this one. As she is the last person with whom I shared a moment of pleasure and insouciance, she has become as precious to me as if I had spent a whole life with heran uninterrupted life, henceforth almost fantasized, and that stopped on that evening, in a theater, with old Shakespeare. Since then, I havent seen Nina often, but I dont need to see her to know what she reminds me of or to feel that she is continuing to protect me. She has the strange privilege of being both a friend and a memorya distant friend, a living recollection. There is no chance that I will forget her, but although she will not be very present in the rest of this book, that is because I find it hard to bring her to life outside that evening and everything it reminds me of. I think about her, everything springs back to life and dies away, sometimes successively, sometimes in parallel. Everything is a dream and a passage, perhaps an illusion, as in Twelfth Night. Nina remains the last point on the opposite bank, at the entrance to the bridge that the attacks blew up. Sketching her portrait allows me to remain there a little while longer, balanced on the ruins of the bridge.

Nina is a small, plump, auburn-haired woman with soft skin, an aquiline nose, and dark, bright, amused eyes, who softens with humor emotions that are always strong and that her kindness seems to surrender to the whims of others. Shes a lawyer. Shes a good cook. She forgets nothing. Shes a socialist, but of the leftthere still are some of those. She looks like a blackbird, tenderhearted, severe, and well-fed. She lives alone with her daughter, Marianne, to whom I gave my transverse flute, an instrument I no longer played and will probably never be able to play again. Her experience with men has disappointed her, I believe, without making her bitter. Maybe she thinks she doesnt deserve more pleasure and love than she has received from them; but she gives so much in friendship, and to her daughter, that the state of love, the fiction people try to write by means of the body, is no longer an absolute necessity. And maybe also because, as in politics, she always senses a looming disappointment that her good nature is preparing to overcome. She does not give up her feelings any more than she gives up her convictions. The fact that the left constantly betrays the people does not mean that Nina, like so many others, will end up on the right. The fact that so many men are selfish, vain nullities does not mean that Nina will stop loving. Tenderness resists principles. One detail that makes me admire her is that she never comes empty-handed, and what she brings with her always corresponds to the expectations or needs of those whom she is going to see. In short, she pays attention to others as they are, and where they are. Thats not so common.

I add that shes Jewish, dont forget that, and that being Jewish subtly, discreetly, reminds her that no one is ever sure to escape disaster. I sense this in her smile, in her eyes, when I see her, when we talk; its something that simplifies life and exists so naturally only in a very small number of persons, and Im grateful to her for it. A Jewish joke is always floating in the air, between the wine and the pasta, like a fragrance that there is no need to mention. I dont think I could have finished my earlier life with anyone better adapted to the situation.

Her father, a professor of American literature, had been an excellent translator of Philip Roth, a writer I liked, though I had never been able to finish any of his bookswith the exception of Patrimony, in which he recounted the illness and death of his father, and the ones Id been asked to review, a task I never managed to do very well, probably because I wasnt really sure what to think about them. I couldnt see Nina without imagining this father, whom I did not know, translating this or that book of Roths over there, in the United States, in the snow of winter or under a warm summer sun, in front of a coffee pot and a full ashtray. This image, undoubtedly false, reassured me. It superimposed itself on that of Nina, and I always tried to imagine the resemblances between father and daughter. Later on, she showed me a photo of him, in the late 1970s, I think. He had a big black beard, long hair, and glasses with tinted lenses. He exuded the militant energy and libertarian ease of those years. I was a child then, and this world that still seemed to promise something different, another life, disappeared so quickly that I didnt have time to experience it or even to give it up. It was a period that I neither lived nor forgot.