The Kingdom: A Novel

PROLOGUE

(PARIS, 2011)

1

That spring, I collaborated on the script of a TV series. The logline ran like this: One night, in a small mountain town, some of the dead come back to life. No one knows why, nor why these dead and not others. They themselves don’t even know they’re dead. They discover it in the horror-stricken faces of their loved ones, next to whom they’d like to resume their natural place. They’re not zombies, they’re not ghosts, they’re not vampires. It’s not a fantasy film, but reality. It asks the question, seriously: What would happen if this impossible event really did take place? How would you react if, coming into the kitchen, you found your adolescent girl who died three years ago pouring herself a bowl of cereal and worrying she’s going to get bawled out because she came in late, without remembering anything about what happened the night before? Concretely: What would you do with your hands? What would you say?

I stopped writing fiction long ago, but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it. And this was by far the most powerful one I’d been offered in my career as screenwriter. For four months, I worked with the director Fabrice Gobert every day, morning to night, in a blend of enthusiasm and, often, a state of shock at the situations we created, the feelings we manipulated. Then, as far as my participation went, things took a turn for the worse with our backers. I’m almost twenty years older than Fabrice, and I took less willingly than he did to having to jump through hoops for twerps with three-day beards who could have been my sons, and who pulled blasé faces at everything we wrote. The temptation to say Look, you guys, if you know so well how it should be done, then do it yourselves was great. I ceded. Lacking humility and against the wise advice of Hélène, my wife, and François, my agent, I slammed the door halfway through the first season.

I started to regret what I’d done only a couple of months later, at a dinner to which I’d invited both Fabrice and Patrick Blossier, the director of photography who’d created the images for my film La Moustache. I was sure he’d be just right for Les Revenants and that he and Fabrice would hit it off from the start, which they did. But listening to them that night around the kitchen table talking about the series that was taking shape and the stories we’d imagined in my study—stories that were already becoming choices of sets, actors, and technicians—I could almost physically feel that enormous and exciting machine—a film shoot—being set in motion. I said to myself that I should have been part of the adventure and that I was to blame if I wasn’t. All of a sudden I grew sad, as sad as that guy Pete Best, who’d been the drummer for a little Liverpool band called the Beatles and who’d left the group just before it got its first recording contract, and who I figure must have spent the rest of his life regretting it. (Les Revenants has been a huge global success. It won the International Emmy Award for best drama series and has now been remade in the United States as The Returned.)

*   *   *

I drank too much during that dinner. Experience has taught me that it’s better not to go on and on about what you’re writing if you haven’t finished writing it, above all when you’re drunk: such shared enthusiasm is sure to cost you a week of discouragement. But that night, no doubt to vent my sour grapes and show that I too was doing something interesting, I told Fabrice and Patrick about the book on the first Christians I’d been working on for several years. I’d put it aside to work on Les Revenants, and had just picked it up again. I gave them the story the way you pitch a series.

It takes place in Corinth, in Greece, around A.D. 50—but no one, of course, suspects that they’re living in the year of our Lord. It starts with an itinerant preacher who opens a modest weaver’s workshop. Without leaving his loom, the man who would later be known as Saint Paul weaves his tale and, step by step, spreads it over the city. Bald, bearded, weakened by a mysterious sickness, he tells with a deep, evocative voice the story of a prophet crucified twenty years earlier in Judea. He says that this prophet came back from the dead and that his coming back from the dead is the portent of something enormous, a mutation of humanity, both radical and invisible. The contagion comes about. The strange belief radiates out from Paul in the seedy parts of Corinth, and its followers soon come to see themselves as mutants disguised as friends and neighbors: undetectable.

Fabrice’s eyes light up: Told like that, it sounds like vintage Dick! The science fiction author Philip K. Dick was a major reference during our screenwriting work. I can feel my audience is captivated and go a step further: yes, it sounds like Dick, and this story of the early days of Christianity is also the story of Les Revenants. What we tell in Les Revenants is the last days that Paul’s followers were sure they would experience, when the dead come back to life and the judgment of the world is consummated. It’s the community of outcasts and chosen ones that forms around this shocking event: a resurrection. It’s the story of something impossible that nevertheless takes place. I get excited, pour myself glass after glass, insist on filling my guests’ glasses as well, and it’s then that Patrick says something that’s basically pretty banal but which strikes me because it seems to come to him out of the blue, something that he’s never thought about before and that takes him completely by surprise.

*   *   *

He says it’s strange, when you think about it, that normal, intelligent people can believe something as unreasonable as the Christian religion, something exactly like Greek mythology or fairy tales. In ancient times, okay: people were gullible, science didn’t exist. But today! Nowadays if a guy believed stories about gods turning into swans to seduce mortals, or princesses kissing frogs that become Prince Charmings, everyone would say he’s nuts. But tons of people believe in something just as outrageous and no one thinks they’re nuts. Even if you don’t share their faith, you take them seriously. They play a social role, less important than in the past, but one that’s respected and rather positive on the whole. Their pie-in-the-sky ideas coexist alongside perfectly level-headed activities. Presidents pay deferential visits to their leader. Really, it’s kind of strange, isn’t it?

2

Yes, it’s strange, and Nietzsche, whom I read a couple of pages of every morning in a café after taking Jeanne to school, expresses exactly the same astonishment as Patrick Blossier when he says:

When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible? This, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God’s son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and the ignominy of the cross—how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?

And yet they are believed. Many people believe them. At church they recite the Creed, every word of which is an insult to common sense, and they recite it in their own language, which they’re supposed to understand. My father, who took me to church on Sundays when I was little, regretted that it was no longer in Latin, both out of a sense of attachment to the past and because, I remember his words, in Latin you can’t hear how silly it is. You can always reassure yourself with the thought that they don’t believe what they’re saying. Just like they don’t believe in Santa Claus. It’s part of the heritage of beautiful, secular customs to which they’re attached. In perpetuating them, they’re proudly affirming a link with the spirit that inspired the cathedrals and the music of Bach. They mumble all this because it’s the done thing, the way we middle-class liberals who’ve replaced Sunday Mass with yoga classes mumble a mantra recited by the teacher before starting to practice. In our mantra, however, we wish for the rain to fall when it should and for all men to live in peace. Pious sentiments, okay, but ones that don’t offend reason, which you can hardly say for Christianity.

Of course, aside from those who don’t worry too much about the words at Mass and let themselves be lulled by the music, there must also be those who pronounce them with conviction, fully aware of what they’re saying. If asked, they would say they really do believe that a Jew who lived two thousand years ago was born of a virgin and resurrected three days after he was crucified, and that he will return to judge the living and the dead. And they say that they themselves place these events at the center of their lives.

Yes, it’s strange all right.

3

When I deal with a subject, I like to approach it from several angles. Once I’d started writing about the first Christian communities, I got the idea that I should also write a piece for a magazine about what had become of their belief two thousand years later and take one of those cruises in the footsteps of Saint Paul organized by agencies specialized in religious tourism.

Before they died, my first wife’s parents dreamed of doing just that, as well as of taking a pilgrimage to Lourdes. But whereas they went to Lourdes several times, the Saint Paul cruise remained a dream. I think at one point the children talked about chipping in to offer my widowed mother-in-law the cruise she’d have so loved to go on with her husband. But without him, her heart wasn’t in it: the family insisted for a bit, then let it drop.

Of course, I don’t have the same tastes as my ex-parents-in-law, and I imagined with a mixture of amusement and horror the half-day stopovers at Corinth or Ephesus, the group of pilgrims following their guide, a young priest waving a little flag and delighting his listeners with his wry humor. That’s a recurring theme in Catholic families, I’ve noticed: the priest’s sense of humor, the priest’s jokes. Just the thought of it makes me shudder. The chances of meeting a pretty girl in such a group were slim—and supposing I did, I wondered how I’d react to one who’d signed up for a Catholic cruise: Was I perverse enough to find that sexy? That being said, my project wasn’t about flirting but about approaching the cruise participants as a sample group of committed Christians and methodically interviewing them for ten days. Was it better to do such fieldwork incognito and pretend you share their faith, like the journalists who infiltrate neo-Nazi milieus, or to put your cards on the table? I didn’t hesitate for long. I don’t like the first method, and in my view the second always gives better results. I’d tell the plain truth: I’m an agnostic writer who wants to know what exactly Christians believe today. If you want to share that with me, I’d be delighted; if not, I won’t bother you any longer.

Knowing me, I’m sure it would have worked. Day after day, meal after meal, conversation after conversation, I’d have come to find these people—with whom on the face of it I had almost nothing in common—endearing, moving even. I saw myself kindly grilling a table of Catholics over dinner, for example taking apart the Apostles’ Creed phrase by phrase. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. You believe in God, but how do you see him? As a bearded old man up on his cloud? As a superior force? As a being so large that we’re like ants beside him? As a lake or a flame at the bottom of your heart? And Jesus Christ, his only son, who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end? Tell me about this glory, this judgment, this kingdom. And, to get to the heart of the matter: Do you believe he really was resurrected?

*   *   *

It was the jubilee year of Saint Paul: the clergy on board the liner would no doubt outdazzle each other. The archbishop of Paris was among the invited speakers. Demand was high, many of the pilgrims were going as couples, and most singles agreed to share a cabin with a passenger of the same sex—something I had no interest in whatsoever. And if you did insist on a single cabin, the cruise wasn’t exactly cheap: practically twenty-four hundred dollars. I paid half almost six months in advance. Already it was nearly sold out.

The date approached, I started to feel uneasy. It bugged me to find envelopes with the logo of Saint Paul Cruises on the pile of letters in the hall. Hélène, who already suspected me of being Catholic around the edges, as she said, viewed my project with perplexity. I didn’t talk about it with anyone and eventually realized that in fact it embarrassed me.

What embarrassed me was the suspicion that I was going more or less to make fun of the whole thing, or at least was motivated by the sort of condescending curiosity you see in TV programs on dwarf tossing, psychiatrists for guinea pigs, or look-alike contests for the Singing Nun, that unfortunate Belgian nun with a guitar and pigtails who sang Dominique, nique, nique and, after her fifteen minutes of fame, died of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. When I was twenty, I wrote a few articles for a weekly that was trying to be trendy and provocative, and whose first issue included a feature entitled Confessionals Put to the Test. Disguised as a devout Christian, that is to say, dressed as badly as possible, the journalist set out to trap the priests of various Parisian parishes, confessing to increasingly far-fetched sins. He told the story in an amused tone, implying as if it went without saying that he was a thousand times freer and more intelligent than the poor priests and their flock. Even at the time, I found that stupid, shocking—all the more so because anyone who did something like that in a synagogue or mosque would be immediately hit by a storm of protest from all sides. It seems Christians are the only people you can make fun of with impunity by getting all the laughers on your side. I started to think that although I claimed I was acting in good faith, my safari among the Catholics was a bit like that as well.

It wasn’t too late to cancel my reservation and even to get my deposit back, but I couldn’t make up my mind. When the letter arrived asking me to pay the second installment, I chucked it out. Other reminders followed, which I ignored. Finally the agency called me up, and I said that no, something had come up, I couldn’t go. The woman politely pointed out that I could have told her sooner, because a month before the departure no one else would take my cabin: even if I didn’t go I’d have to pay the full sum. I got annoyed, and said that half was already a lot to pay for a cruise I wouldn’t go on. She quoted the contract, which left no doubt in the matter. I hung up. For a couple of days I thought I’d just lie low. There had to be a waiting list, surely some pious bachelor would be delighted to take my cabin, and in any case they’d never sue me. Or would they? The agency was sure to have a collection service, they’d send me registered letter after registered letter, and if I didn’t pay, this would end up in court. I suddenly felt a flush of paranoia at the thought that the story could prompt a derisive little article and that after that my name would be associated with a ridiculous affair about my being too cheap to pay my way on a cruise for zealots. To be honest—though I know it’s not necessarily any less ridiculous—added to my fear of being caught out was the knowledge that I’d planned something that increasingly struck me like a bad deed, and that it was only right that I should pay for it. So I didn’t wait for the first registered letter to send the second check.

4

The more I’ve worked on this book, the clearer it has become to me that it’s very difficult to get people to talk about their faith, and that the question "What exactly do you believe?" is a bad one. Moreover, although it took me a surprisingly long time, I finally realized that it was ludicrous to want to interview Christians the way I’d interview people who’d survived a plane crash, been struck by lightning, or been held hostage. Because in fact I’ve had very close access to one Christian for several years, someone, indeed, you could hardly be closer to, because it was me.

*   *   *

In a word, in autumn 1990 I’d been touched by grace. It would be an understatement to say that it embarrasses me to put it that way today, but that’s how I put it at the time. The fervor that was born of this conversion—I want to put quotes just about everywhere—lasted almost three years, during which time I got married in a church, had my two sons baptized, and went to Mass regularly—and by regularly I don’t mean every week but every day. I went to confession and took Communion. I prayed, and urged my sons to pray with me—something they like to tease me about now that they’re grown up.

Every day during these years I jotted down ideas on a few verses of the Gospel of John. These commentaries take up around twenty notebooks, which I’ve never opened since. I don’t have very good memories of this period and have done my best to forget them. Miracles of the unconscious: I did such a good job that I was able to start writing on the origins of Christianity without making the connection, and without remembering that there was a time when I believed in this story that so interests me today.

Now I remember. And even if it scares me, I know it’s time to reread these notebooks.

But where are they?

5

The last time I saw them was in 2005, and I was doing very, very badly. That was the last of my major crises, and one of the worst. For convenience’s sake you could call it a depression, but I don’t think that’s what it was. The psychiatrist I was seeing at the time didn’t think so either, or that antidepressants would help. He was right. The several I tried had nothing but unpleasant side effects. The only treatment that brought me any relief was an antipsychotic drug that, according to the leaflet, remedied erroneous beliefs. Few things made me laugh at the time, but these erroneous beliefs did, though my laughter wasn’t what you’d call cheery.

In my book Lives Other Than My Own, I described my visit to the old psychoanalyst François Roustang, but I only told the end. Here I’ll tell the beginning—that was one dense session. I let it all out: the persistent pain in the pit of my stomach, which I compared to the fox devouring the young Spartan’s entrails in the legends of ancient Greece; the feeling—or rather, the certainty—that I’d been checkmated, wasn’t able to love or work, and harmed everything I touched. I said I was thinking of suicide. Despite everything, I’d come hoping Roustang might propose another solution, and since, to my great surprise, he didn’t seem to want to propose anything at all, I asked if he’d accept me as a patient as a last-ditch effort. I’d already spent ten years on the couches of two of his colleagues, without any notable results—or so I thought at the time. Roustang replied that no, he wouldn’t. First, because he was too old, and second, because in his view the only thing that interested me in analysis was confounding the analyst, something I clearly excelled at, and that if I wanted to demonstrate my skill a third time he wasn’t going to stop me, but, he added, not with me. And if I were you, I’d try something else.

Like what? I asked, with all the superiority of the incurable.

Well, Roustang went on, you talked about suicide. It doesn’t get very good press these days, but sometimes it’s a solution.

After that he was silent. So was I.

Then he went on: Or you can live.

With these two sentences he shattered the system that had let me hold my two previous analysts in check. It was bold of him, the kind of boldness Jacques Lacan must have allowed himself on the basis of a similar clinical acumen. Roustang understood that no matter what I thought, I wasn’t about to kill myself, and, bit by bit, without my ever seeing him again, things started to improve. Nevertheless, I went home feeling no better than when I’d gone to see him—that is, not really determined to kill myself but sure I’d do it anyway. There was a hook in the ceiling over the bed where I lay all day long, and I got up on a stepladder to test its strength. I wrote a letter to Hélène, another to my sons, a third to my parents. I cleaned out my computer, not hesitating to delete a few files I didn’t want anyone to find after my death. However, I did wonder what to do with a box that had followed me from move to move without my ever opening it. That was the box with the notebooks from my Christian period, in which I’d written my commentaries on the Gospel of John every morning.

I’d always thought I’d reread them one day, and that I may well even gain something from them. After all, it’s not so common to have firsthand access to documents on a period of your life when you were totally different from what you’ve become, when you were firmly convinced of something you now find absurd. On the one hand, I had no wish whatsoever to leave these documents behind me if I died. On the other, if I didn’t kill myself I’d certainly regret having destroyed them.

Miracles of the unconscious, continued: I don’t remember what I did. Or rather, I remember dragging my depression around with me for another couple of months, then starting to write what became My Life as a Russian Novel, which pulled me from the abyss. As for the cardboard box, the last I recall is seeing it unopened in front of me on my study carpet and wondering what I should do with it.

Seven years later I’m in the same study, in the same apartment, and I wonder what I did with it. If I’d destroyed it, it seems to me I’d remember, especially if I’d destroyed it dramatically, by tossing it into the flames. But maybe I did it more prosaically, and just took it down and chucked it out. And if I kept it, where did I put it? In a safety deposit box? That’s like the flames: I’d remember. No, it must have stayed in the apartment, and if it stayed in the apartment …

I can feel I’m burning hot.

6

In my study there’s a closet where we keep suitcases, stuff for working around the house, foam mattresses for when friends of our daughter, Jeanne, come and stay: things we need from time to time. But it’s like in that children’s book A Dark, Dark Tale, where in the dark, dark castle there’s a dark, dark hall leading to a dark, dark room with a dark, dark cupboard, and so on. At the back of this closet there’s another, smaller, lower one that’s unlit and harder to get at, of course, where we keep things we never use, things that will stay there, practically beyond reach, until a next move forces us to decide on their fate. This is mostly the usual mix you find in any storage room: rolled-up old carpets, obsolete stereo equipment, a suitcase full of audiocassettes, garbage bags containing judo outfits, punch mitts, and boxing gloves, attesting to the successive passions of my sons and me for combat sports. Almost half the closet, however, is taken up by something not so usual: the investigation file on Jean-Claude Romand, who killed his wife, his kids, and his parents in January 1993 after pretending he was a doctor for over fifteen years, although in fact he was nothing at all—he spent his days in his car, at highway rest areas, or walking in the dark forests of the Jura Mountains.

*   *   *

The word file is misleading. It’s not one file but fifteen or so, bound and cinched together, each one very thick and containing documents ranging from endless witness testimonies to expert reports to miles and miles of bank statements. I think everyone who has written about this kind of case has had—like me—the feeling that these tens of thousands of bits of paper tell a story, and that this story must be extracted the way a sculptor extracts a statue from a block of marble. During the difficult years I spent documenting and then writing about this case, these files were a source of fascination for me. In principle they were inaccessible to the public as long as the trial was still pending, so I was only able to consult them as a special favor on the part of Romand’s lawyer, in his office in Lyon. Left alone with them for an hour or so in a little windowless room, I was allowed to take notes but not to make photocopies. It sometimes happened that—after I’d come all the way from Paris just to view them—the lawyer said: No, it’s not possible today, or tomorrow either. Come back in two weeks. I think he got a kick out of stringing me along like that.

After the trial, at the end of which Jean-Claude Romand was sentenced to life imprisonment, things were simpler: in accordance with the law, Romand became the owner of his file, and he allowed me to make use of it. Unable to keep it with him in prison, he’d entrusted it to a woman he’d befriended, a volunteer for a Catholic prison ministry. It was at her place in Lyon that I went to pick it up. I stowed these boxes in the trunk of my car and, back in Paris, in the studio apartment where I worked at the time, on Rue du Temple. Five years later The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, my book on the Romand affair, appeared. The woman from the prison ministry called me up to say she’d appreciated the book’s honesty but was saddened by one detail: that I say she seemed relieved to dump the macabre keepsake on me and happy the files were now under my roof and not hers. It didn’t bother me at all to have them. If it bothers you, just bring them back. We’ve got plenty of room for them here.

I thought I would as soon as I got the chance, but this chance never came up. I no longer had a car, had no particular reason to go to Lyon, it was never the right moment. As a result, in 2000 I hauled the three huge boxes in which I’d stored the files from Rue du Temple to Rue Blanche, then, in 2005, from Rue Blanche to Rue des Petits-Hôtels. There could be no question of tossing them: Romand entrusted them to me, and if he wants them I have to be able to give them back when he gets out. As he received twenty-two years and is a model prisoner, he’s been eligible for parole since 2015. Pending his release, I decided that the best place to keep these boxes that I had no reason or inclination to open again was this inner closet in my study, which Hélène and I finally nicknamed Jean-Claude Romand’s room. And, it struck me all of a sudden, the best place to stash the notebooks from my Christian period—if I hadn’t destroyed them when I was thinking of killing myself—was right next to these files, in Jean-Claude Romand’s room.

I

A CRISIS

(PARIS, 1990–1993)

1

There’s a passage I love in Casanova’s memoirs. Locked away in Venice’s dark and humid Piombi prison, Casanova hatches an escape plan. He’s got all he needs to bring it off except for one thing: hemp to make a rope, or a fuse for explosives, I forget which, but the key thing is that if he can get his hands on some he’s saved, and if he can’t he’s lost. It’s not as if hemp was easy to come by in prison, but all of a sudden Casanova remembers that to absorb the perspiration under his arms, when he had his suit made he asked the tailor to line the jacket with—guess what? Hemp! Casanova, who cursed his thin summer jacket that does so little to protect him from the cold prison air, understands that it was divine providence that made him wear it the day he was arrested. It’s there, in front of him, hanging on a nail hammered into the crumbling wall. He looks at it, his heart beating. In a second he’ll tear open the seams, search the lining, and freedom will be his. But just as he goes to grab it, he’s seized by doubt: What if, in a moment of oversight, the tailor didn’t do as he asked? Normally, that would hardly matter. Now it would be tragic. So much is at stake that Casanova falls to his knees and starts to pray. With an ardor he’s forgotten since his childhood, he prays to God that the tailor has indeed sewn hemp into his jacket. At the same time his faculty of reasoning doesn’t remain idle. It tells him that what is done is done. Either the tailor has sewn hemp into the lining or he hasn’t. Either it’s there or it isn’t, and if it isn’t there, his prayers won’t change a thing. God is not going to put it there, or retroactively give the tailor the conscientiousness he lacked. These logical objections don’t stop Casanova from praying like a lost soul, and he’ll never know if his prayer had any effect, because the hemp really is in the jacket. He escapes.

*   *   *

In my case the stakes weren’t as high. I didn’t get down on my knees and pray for them to be there, but the archives from my Christian period really were in Jean-Claude Romand’s room. Once they were out of their box, it took me a while to overcome the wariness I felt at the sight of these eighteen green and red bound notebooks. When I finally resolved to open the first one, two folded typewritten sheets of paper fell out, on which I read the following:

Statement of intent by Emmanuel Carrère for his marriage with Anne D., 23 December 1990.

Anne and I have been living together for four years. We have two children. We love each other and are as sure of this love as one can be.

We were no less in love just a few months ago, when we didn’t see the need for a religious marriage. I don’t think that in opting out we were putting off or refusing a binding commitment. On the contrary, we saw ourselves as committed to each other, and intent, for better or for worse, on living, growing, and getting old together, and, consequently, on one of us being there when the other dies.

Quite apart from any questions of faith, I believed that the goal of communal life was to discover yourself in discovering your partner, and to encourage your partner to do the same. I thought that the growth of one was the condition for the growth of the other, and that in seeking Anne’s good I was in fact seeking my own—which I certainly didn’t lose sight of. I even started to sense that this mutual growth happens according to the laws of love as John the Baptist described them: He (in this case she) must increase; I must decrease.

I’d stopped seeing this formula as reflecting the kind of masochism felt by someone who’s incapable of elevating his partner without lowering himself, and had understood that I had to think of Anne, her happiness and her fulfillment, more than I thought of myself, and that the more I thought of her, the more I’d do for myself. I discovered, in short, one of the paradoxes of Christianity that turn worldly wisdom on its head—namely, that you have every interest in scorning your own interest, and in losing sight of yourself to love yourself.

I found that hard. All our misery is rooted in self-esteem, and my self-esteem, exacerbated by my line of work (I write novels, one of the delirious professions, as Paul Valéry said, based entirely on the opinion one has—and gives—of oneself), is particularly tyrannical. Of course I did my best to escape this quagmire of fear, vanity, hatred, and self-absorption, but my efforts resembled those of Baron Munchausen, who pulls himself out of a swamp by his hair.

I had always believed I could rely on no one but myself. Faith, which I was graced with just a few days ago, has delivered me from this tiring illusion. Suddenly I grasped that it is up to us to choose between life and death, that life is Christ and that his yoke is light. Since then I’ve felt this lightness constantly. I’m expecting it to spill over onto Anne, and that she’ll respect Saint Paul’s commandment as I would like to and be joyful always.

I used to think our union depended only on us: our free choice, our goodwill. That its endurance was contingent on us and us alone. I wanted nothing more than a life of love with Anne. But to accomplish that I relied only on our strength, and of course I was appalled at our weakness. Now I know that it is not we who accomplish what we accomplish, but Christ in us.

That’s why today I feel we should put our love in his hands, and ask him to grace it and let it grow.

That’s also why I consider our marriage my true entry in the life of sacrament, from which I have distanced myself since a first Communion which I received—let’s say—absentmindedly.

And, finally, that’s why it’s important for me that our marriage be celebrated by a priest I met at the moment of my conversion. It was at his Mass—my first in twenty years—that I felt the pressing need to marry, and even at the time I thought it would be good to receive the marriage blessing from him in Cairo. I’m very thankful to the parish and diocese to which I now belong for understanding this project, which, although sentimental, is far from a whim.

2

Of course it shook me up to reread this letter. The first thing that strikes me is that it rings hollow from the first line to the last, and yet I can’t doubt its sincerity. The second is that, leaving aside its religious fervor, the person who wrote it twenty years ago isn’t so different from the person I am today. His style is a bit more pompous, sure, but it’s still mine. Give me the beginning of one of these sentences and I’ll finish it in the same way. Above all, the desire for a committed relationship and a love that lasts is the same. All that’s changed is its focus. Its current focus suits me better: it’s less hard to believe that Hélène and I will live together in peace and harmony. Nevertheless, the things I believe or want to believe today, and which are the pillar of my life, I believed or wanted to believe twenty years ago in almost identical terms.

*   *   *

Still, the key thing about the letter is what I don’t say, namely, that we were very unhappy. We loved each other, true, but we did it all wrong. Both of us were afraid of life, and we were both terribly neurotic. We drank too much, made love as if we were gasping for air, and each tended to blame the other for our unhappiness. For three years I hadn’t been able to write—which I considered my sole reason to exist at the time. I felt powerless, relegated to the suburb of life that is an unhappy marriage, bogged down in a long and dreary rut. I told myself that the best thing would be to leave, but I was afraid that would bring catastrophe and destroy Anne and our two little boys, as well as myself. To justify my paralysis I also told myself that what was happening to me was a test, that making a success of my life—our life—depended on my being able to plod on in this seemingly impossible situation, instead of throwing in the towel as common sense suggested. Common sense was my enemy. I preferred my mysterious intuition, and tried to convince myself that one day it would reveal another, far higher, meaning.

3

Now I have to talk about Jacqueline, my godmother. Few people have had such an influence on me. A very young—and very beautiful—widow, she never remarried. In the sixties several volumes of her half-amorous, half-mystical poetry were put out by prestigious publishers. Later, my godmother abandoned secular poetry and dedicated herself to hymns. A good number of the hymns sung in French churches since Vatican II were penned by her. She lived in a beautiful apartment on Rue Vaneau in the building formerly occupied by André Gide, and something about her evoked the kind of studious, almost austere, aura that you associate with the Nouvelle Revue Française—for which Gide wrote—between the wars. At a time when it was less common than it is today, she was well versed in Oriental wisdom and practiced yoga—thanks to which, until an advanced age, she was lithe as a cat.

One day, I must have been fourteen or fifteen, she told me to lie down on the rug in her living room, close my eyes, and concentrate on the base of my tongue. I found that very disconcerting, almost shocking. As an adolescent I was too cultivated, and obsessively worried that people were trying to take me for a ride. Very early on I’d made a habit of finding amusing—that was my favorite adjective—everything that in fact attracted or frightened me: other people, girls, a zest for life. My ideal was to observe the absurd turmoil of the world without taking part in it, with the superior smile of someone who’s above all that. Actually I was terrified. My godmother’s poetry and mysticism offered a perfect target for my perpetual irony, but I also felt that she liked me and, to the extent that I was able to trust anyone back then, I trusted her. At the time, of course, I made a point of finding it highly ridiculous to lie on the floor and think of my tongue. But I did what she asked, tried to let my thoughts flow without judging or holding on to them, and took the first step on the path that later led me to the martial arts, yoga, and meditation.

That’s one of the many reasons for the gratitude I now feel for her. She gave me something that stopped me from doing really stupid things. She taught me that time was my ally. Sometimes I think that when I was born my mother sensed she could give me the arms I needed to face the worlds of culture and intelligence, but that for another, essential realm of existence she would have to defer to someone else. And that someone else was this woman who was older than she was, both eccentric and completely focused, and who had taken her under her wing when she was twenty. My mother lost her parents at a young age, she grew up in poverty, and what she fears above all else is counting for nothing in this world. For her, Jacqueline was a sort of mentor, the very picture of an accomplished woman, and above all a witness to this dimension that’s … how to put it? Spiritual? I don’t like the word; nevertheless, everyone knows more or less what it refers to. My mother knew it existed—or rather, she knows it exists, that this inner kingdom is the only one that’s really worth aspiring to: the treasure for which the Gospel tells us to renounce all riches. But her difficult personal history made these riches—success, social status, popular acclaim—infinitely desirable for her, and she spent her life going after them. She succeeded, she got it all, she never said That’s enough. I’d be quite out of line to cast the first stone: I’m like that myself. I need all the glory I can get, I need to occupy as much room as I can in other people’s minds. But I think that in my mother’s mind there has always been a voice reminding her that another combat, the true combat, takes place elsewhere. It’s to hear this voice that she’s read Saint Augustine her whole life, almost in secret, and that she went to visit Jacqueline. And it’s to let me hear it too that she entrusted me in a way to Jacqueline. Sometimes she’d joke about it prudishly. She’d say, You were at Jacqueline’s? Did she talk to you about your soul? And I’d respond in the same mockingly affectionate tone: Of course, what else is there to talk about with her?

That was her role: she talked to you about your soul. We went to see her—and when I say we, it wasn’t just my mother and me: my father went too, and so did dozens of others, people of all ages and backgrounds, and not necessarily believers. We all went to see her on Rue Vaneau, always one-to-one, the way you go see a psychoanalyst or a confessor. With her there could be no posing, you could only talk heart-to-heart. And you knew not a word would leave her living room. She’d look, and listen. You felt yourself looked at and listened to like no one had ever looked at or listened to you before, and then she’d speak to you about yourself as no one had ever done.

*   *   *

In her last years my godmother slipped into apocalyptic flights of fancy that left me more than saddened. The whole logic of her life made you think her last days would be marked by an apotheosis of light, yet she sank into the darkness; it’s something I don’t like thinking about. But until she was eighty she was one of the most remarkable people I knew, and her way of being remarkable shook up all my points of reference. At the time I admired and envied a single category of humanity: creators. I thought the only thing worth accomplishing in life was to be a great artist—and I hated myself, because in the best of cases I’d be a minor one. Jacqueline’s poems hardly impressed me, but if there was anyone around I could consider an accomplished human being, it was her. The few writers and filmmakers I knew were no match for her. Their talent, their charisma, their enviable place in existence were special, narrow advantages, and, even if I didn’t know in what way, it jumped out at you that Jacqueline was more advanced. I don’t just mean she was morally superior: above all, she knew more, she put more things together in her mind. I can’t put it any better than that. She was more advanced, the way you can say in biology that one organism is more evolved and consequently more complex than