If, p.25
If, page 25
She would have liked to have brothers and sisters to lean on, to build a rampart of childish nonchalance and complicity, to share times of happiness and perhaps also of sadness. She did in fact have three of them, three siblings. Two boys and a girl. But, being some ten years older, they had had a head start and constituted their own community with carefully concealed weaknesses. At first they said they would have preferred a dog, but it was not long before they realized that this was in fact better—Little Hope provided a solution to their problems. Surely collective tensions could be freely incarnated in this last offshoot that did not yet have any knowledge, the power of speech, or even a definitive form? It was too perfect a godsend and the process was already tried and tested. Frustration simply had to be transformed into aggression. Jealousy would serve as a driving force. After all, she was exasperating, this little thing with her unfailing good humor and her unconditional love, naively waiting for some reciprocation that no one was prepared to offer. She was exasperating because she was too affectionate, too clever, too sensitive, too everything. The truth was she was exasperating because she was, period. As in ancient civilizations, the group entrusted their collective survival to the sacrifice of a single individual. The conditions had been fulfilled: having arrived late, the child was elementally different to the community. She was immediately designated guilty, and better still she herself felt inherently guilty. And fundamentally illegitimate.
More often than not she was ignored. Her pleasures and pains were never mentioned unless to be mocked or belittled, and this indifference was the most exquisite torture. Nevertheless, her older siblings did sometimes come looking for her, when the need arose, one to dazzle by comparison, one to confide, another for distraction. She then ensured she was good company and an empathetic listener. Because she lived apart from them, she had grown accustomed to listening and watching, and could therefore guess at each of their private hurts—the exhausting quest for recognition in one, the emotional instability in another, and the failure complex in the third. She understood the causes of these hurts and forgave their consequences, despite the effect they had on her. Her siblings too were victims; they too were innocent. Like her parents, like herself. And yet she was wrong. The intimacy she felt in these shared exchanges was illusory. If Little Hope tried to talk about herself in return the others cut her short. Whatever cruel fate befell her, whatever injustice she felt, she always deserved it. In order to function properly, the mechanism needed to stay hidden. The others genuinely needed to believe she was at fault. And so they all forbade themselves to think about her for fear of having to admit the terrible truth. They couldn’t run the risk of loving her.
This is how and why Little Hope felt like the custodian of a shameful secret that she herself did not know. It carved a hole in her heart. And yet she knew plenty of other hidden facts in this family. She even felt she was the only one to whom the buried traumas of the lineage had been passed down. The accidents, the illnesses, the mental problems, the grief. Guardian of these taboos, she now watched over the skeletons in the closets, behind her smile, like closed doors. In any given situation it was appropriate for her to hold her tongue and by doing this she allowed the essentials of her life to pass her by. She was not writing herself into her own story. And it was not the most significant incongruity of her childhood that she found she was both aware of everything and blind to herself.
Against all expectations, the family system was sustained when they reached adulthood. In this specific area, the siblings never grew up. The discrepancies emerged. Little Hope had a partner later, younger children, took a different career, went to live in a different town, and even in another country. She was not forgiven. The siblings lost interest in her. They did not invite her to anything, did not call her, did not come to see her. The family rarely got together in any event. Little Hope was reduced to being an idea or a fantasy to her brothers and sisters. They knew nothing about her. She continued to exist for them only through their parents’ words, words intended to keep her—whether in admiration or criticism—in the separate place that had been attributed to her from the start. She therefore lost any chance of an objective existence and any possibility of a meaningful relationship with her family.
* * *
—
One day an unusual tragedy struck Little Hope. One of her children was diagnosed with a very serious illness. For weeks, months, years she feared for his life. The violence of the real world succeeded—for a time—in introducing a chink in the system. The parents became parents, the sister a sister. Only the brothers still wavered. The eldest shut himself away in total avoidance, appearing only when the treatment was over to celebrate this ending because, he claimed, it had been intolerable, his mother couldn’t talk about anything else. Jealousy made him omit the fact that this was by no means the end yet. The second brother hesitated and came to visit his nephew once but made a point of how much it cost him, financially. He and his wife had concluded that this illness was not in fact particularly serious and, at the end of the day, was preferable to the multiple operations endured by another nephew of theirs. The brothers agreed on this point, had discussed it, thereby ignoring not only the very real risk of death but also the poor taste of making the comparison. Besides, neither one of them thought to ask Little Hope how she was feeling. This indifference, far from being an abomination, actually proved liberating. It urged Little Hope to question her origins. When the illness was finally quashed, she asked her mother about the secrecy surrounding her birth. And in so doing found the keys to the mystery.
* * *
—
First of all there was a small piece of card, some three inches by four. Like an invitation or a greeting card. Or an announcement card. On it was a series of dates written in black ink, regularly, one under the other. Next to each date was an event, most of them sad. The signs needed deciphering. Cancers were noted with the initials “KC,” deaths with a cross, anything else written out in full. There were ten dates between 1967 and 1999, two cancers (Little Hope’s father and grandfather), six deaths (her grandparents, her step-grandfather, and a great aunt), a fractured spine for her father, and surgery for her mother. Each person was identified by name or by their relationship to Little Hope’s mother: her husband, her birth father, the stepfather who raised her, her mother, her aunt, etc. In 1971, huddled between a cancer and a death, came the birth of Little Hope. “It’s not tragic,” the mother said, “it’s the map of a life.” Little Hope simply wondered whose life she meant.
Her mother then handed her another element of her reply. A text to read, with no commentary. It was a poem by Charles Péguy called “A Little Hope,” and it said:
What surprises me, says God, is hope.
I can’t get over it.
This little hope that looks like nothing at all.
This little girl hope.
Immortal hope.
[…]
Hope is a little nothing of a girl.
[…]
And yet this little girl will travel many
worlds.
This little nothing of a girl.
She alone will carry the others as she travels long-lost worlds.
[…]
Little hope walks between her two older sisters, and
goes quite unnoticed.
On the road to salvation and on the earthly path,
on the rocky path to salvation and on the never-ending
path, on the path between her sisters,
little hope
Keeps going.
Between her sisters.
One of them married.
The other a mother.
And all that anyone notices, all that Christian people
notice are the two older sisters.
[…]
One on the right and the other on the left.
And they hardly even see the girl in the middle.
The little one, who’s still at school.
And who keeps walking.
Lost in her sisters’ skirts.
And they readily believe that the older two are
leading the youngest along by the hand.
In the middle.
Between them.
To help her on this rocky path to salvation.
Only the blind cannot see the reverse.
That it’s the child in the middle who’s leading her
sisters.
And without her they would be nothing.
But two women already grown old.
Two elderly women. Withered by life.
And she, the little one, leads them all.
[…]
Hope sees what has not yet been and what is to come.
She loves what has not yet been and what is to come.
In the future of time and of all eternity.
On that arduous, sandy, uphill path.
On the uphill road.
Dragged along, clinging to her sisters’ arms,
As they hold her hand,
Little hope. Keeps going.
And there, between her sisters, she appears to let
them drag her.
Like a child too tired to walk.
Who might be hauled along this road in spite of
herself.
When in fact she is the one getting the other two to
walk.
And leading them along,
And moving the whole world forwards.
And leading it along.
Because no one ever works but for children.
And the older two would not walk but for little hope.
Little Hope folded up the poem again. She feigned naivete, claimed she did not understand why her mother was showing it to her with its endless succession of theological allegories and emphatic pauses. She had been hoping for a more candid answer. “Don’t you think it’s beautiful? It’s magnificent. In fact, I sent it to everyone when you were born,” her mother told her with tears in her eyes. One feint deserves another. “Well, I think it’s kind of heavy-going,” Little Hope replied. “And I don’t see what it has to do with me.” She certainly had no intention of discussing its aesthetics; this was no literary soiree. Things needed saying, the system clearly exposing, the mystery denouncing. Because, in truth, she understood all too clearly what was being sought here, intertextually—one last refuge. She had read every line of it, had felt the effects of every word. Its anaphors, accumulations, parallelisms, amplifications and their downfalls, all its rhetoric hammered into her soul the place that had instantly been assigned to her before she was even born. Certainly not the map of a life but a programmed intention. The messianic child, sacrificed to collective redemption, both invisible and essential, ignored and vital, everything and nothing. Nothing for being everything. Everything instead of being. She felt like a dried butterfly, pinned on the white page of her family’s story. Inert, bloodless, frozen in a phantasmatic eternity. A sphinx-like skull stowed away in a box of secrets.
From then on it was all over with Little Hope. She would open the box, invent a new name for herself. She, for example. Or perhaps I. There was so much for this “I” to do. It would build itself slowly, patiently, bit by bit. It would write itself at length because before devoting herself to her own private remission, she had another to support. Not that of her family’s sins but the far more real and tangible remission of her child’s ailing body. The illness relinquishing its hold, the symptoms melting away, the period of observation, an interval of time during which hope of a recovery is born and grows and emerges. And with it the concomitant fear of a relapse. She knew the implications: the waiting, risks, anxieties, separations, and even potential grief. She also knew how hard it would be to pick out her own path in all this, with one foot in the cancer and one foot outside. It had to be survived. The child had to be completely saved, completely breaking away from his chrysalis, in order for her in turn to take flight. At least she could now envision making a start on her direction. “Right now,” she told herself, “I’m the one who’s going to hope.”
* * *
—
Winter’s here again. I can feel it in the crispness hitting my face, in the condensation I exhale and the distinctive tension in the air. But it’s not the cold that strikes me, or the acute contrasts. Or even the almost metallic silence. It’s a smell. An acrid, salty smell. It assaults my nostrils and seems to prickle my mucous surfaces. I don’t recognize it at first. It doesn’t belong here in the city, it’s from somewhere else, somewhere far away, and yet it’s very familiar. Eventually I get it: this smell isn’t coming from outside, it’s bubbling up from the depths of my body’s memory. It’s the smell of the hospital, the smell of the Institute. It came to me automatically by sensory association. My perception of winter triggered an olfactory memory of the Curie. Like a reflex. But this is not simply a question of reminiscence, this synesthesia produces a time loop, bringing the past trauma into the present and connecting it to the future. In a flash, before I’m even aware of the cold, my whole being has registered that winter is here, trailing behind it its retinue of unavoidable events like so many systematic consequences of this one imminent cause: It will soon be December 16. And on December 16 cancer strikes.
This icy morning is heralding a very strange anniversary indeed. It crystalizes the ambivalence of remission, a lull that could foreshadow fine days to come or a return to stormy weather. Fear of a relapse permanently torments the newfound freedom.
There has been a summer, though. Permission, at last, to leave Paris, a few days by the sea. The emotion of seeing our three children holding hands and running into the water. The eldest, you, looking bald, thin, and white with a scar under your armpit, and the younger two full of glee and energy; all of you rolling on the wet sand, throwing yourselves into the waves, grappling with each other. There were meals, games, laughs, fights, and the adoption of a cat. There was coming home in September and going back to school. There was even the regrowth of tiny little hairs here and there on your scalp. But there was also and there remains all the rest, all the aspects of lymphoma that still have a hold on you one way or another. You may be living your life but only under observation. There are many trips back to the Institute, every three weeks we have to check that the sleeping creature hasn’t woken. Its hibernation carries no guarantees. You’re asked to lie down on an examination bed in a small, dark room in the basement. Your neck, stomach, and groin are scanned. Outlines in black, gray, and white emerge on the screen, sound transformed into images. Dozens of tiny oval-shaped entities appear. They need be only slightly rounded, larger, or uniformly dark to attract more attention. Little black holes into which my mind topples. They are studied and measured, one by one. The silence is oppressive. The only talking is from the numbers appearing on the screen. Everyone knows that anything over half an inch means it could all start again. Breathing hangs on that fateful scale. Then it’s back to see Dr. O on the sixth floor in the outpatient department. His clinical examination must confirm the findings of the ultrasound. It is punctuated at best with a “See you in three weeks.” But the leave period is never actually that long; there are emergency consultations in the interim: with fear in our bellies we come back for an unexpected fever, worrying headaches, bloating in your stomach, a gland under your arm, a swelling tonsil. We also need to return here to treat the damage to our souls, yours and the whole family’s. It has attacked in force, if somewhat delayed. When the body is no longer under fire, the mind is at war. And then a whole other fight begins, against trauma, against fear, against the world, against the self. A fight that can go on for years, until there is a complete recovery, and sometimes beyond. A fight that exhausts the individuals waging it, drives away friends, divides families, and breaks up couples.
* * *
—
No one comes out of the Institute unscathed. The truth is it’s a struggle to get out of the place.
Of course, there’s a longing to live and in the early stages everything is there to be rediscovered, the least thing is thrilling—the atmosphere of the outside world, the city’s streets, starting school again, a family weekend, an evening with friends. Returning to normal life is a giddying surprise, even routine is in itself a wonderful break. But soon people find this isn’t enough, they hanker for more, to make up for lost time. Time given over to the illness and before that too. And so they invent new possibilities, they quiver with enthusiasm, jealously guard their freedom, and, in everything they do, they aspire to the essence of life. They find themselves dreaming of untried pleasures and unfulfilled desires, of extensive travels and boundless love. They consume existence avidly, voraciously. With bulimic intensity.
At the same time they find it difficult to get anywhere, they feel hampered, as if they’ve forgotten how to live. This is because they’re still so weighed down with what they’ve just been through, wearing their trauma on their sleeve. Simply because it has happened once means the accident is now always possible. And so each of them individually blunders forward, doubly burdened by a painful past and a worrying future. It’s a heavy load and it gives them a halting step.
