Speechless - Tom Lanoye

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accounts, a book which in my arrogance I had thought in anticipation would scarcely need a writer. It would compose itself, through the energy of its core.

      It didn’t. The cocoon did not allow itself to be cracked just like that. Diffidence is still there, in full force. And I am not going to apologize for that. Diffidence is part of the whole, perhaps even the central theme. Anyone who knows the answer can shout it out. I can only hope that the serried ranks of my demons and dwarves, my memories and my wounds, move in a centripetal vortex, and that that whole pathetic procession—why not here, within about three lines?—may finally be reduced to silence, at its own axis. In the frighteningly calm eye of the inwardly circulating whirlwind which it has itself produced.

      And, well I never. The dust descends. Here it lies. The key, the quintessence, the spell. Staggering, simple and hard. This book is unavoidably also the story of this book, which refused to let itself be written while my father was still alive.

      It has nothing to do with fear of failure with regard to him, the fear of not succeeding in his commission to raise her from the dead with my words. He of all people would never have disavowed my literary labour of Lazarus. He would have welcomed every attempt, however inadequate or mediocre, as a complete miracle, would have acclaimed it as a wonder of the world. Even more so than with my other titles, he would have stocked up on copies from the local bookseller, a few dozen in total (‘I can’t begrudge the man the money, can I, we’re all shopkeepers together?’), gift-wrapped and all, in order to distribute them shamelessly and, despite my spluttering protests, to the whole staff, against all the house rules, in exchange for a kiss from the ladies and a shared drink with the men.

      Fear of failure? The real reason is crueller. I type it with resentment, disgust even. Watch, as these cool words appear, just like that, on my screen and your page: his death was necessary, in reality and on paper, before I could really begin. Her life cannot be described without his, and vice-versa. That’s what you get with those bloody eternal loves, those inseparable lives from an earlier period—they were proud of the fact that they had never exchanged a French kiss with anyone but each other, and I have never met anyone who contradicted that or even cast doubt on it.

      For the book that he awaited so passionately to appear he had first to follow her. His end was one of the links in what he would have liked to read and distribute himself, with a kiss as thanks and drinks as his reward. ‘Your health, my girl.’

      There is a persistent and widespread misconception, among connoisseurs and laymen alike, that writing means ‘preserving’. Establishing what existed, as it existed. Of course it is the other way round. Writing is destroying, in the absence of anything better. Only then and as a result does what you are writing about pass away. Literature is letting go. Writing is dispelling.

      So come on then. Say farewell—you too. Draw a thick, bold cross over it, however gently. Over her, over him. Their neighbourhood, their period, their lives. The great scenes of a small neighbourhood and a family with lots of children, in a corner house without a garden, and a shop with a constantly jingling doorbell—I slept in the room right above it, and during many a morning nightmare I tried out our slicing machine on the fingers of our earliest customers, those unsuspecting anonymous sadists, those instigators of a daily terror, who harried and controlled from morning till night with their hellish jingling.

      A cross over all customers, all meat hooks and that one slicing machine. Put the cleaver into this: the whole human zoology of my youth, in which the oddest beast bears my name, my glasses and my defects, my scars and my lisp. Only in that way will she, Josée, become what she always wanted to be. Bigger than herself, larger than life. Because just as one cannot talk about her without expanding on him, so I cannot write about the two of them without digressing on the whole damned world which I got to know, and over which she ruled, for years. And standing face to face with that realm of woman, I am bound one last time to incline toward sloth and doubt.

      Why me?

      Because, end of story. That’s enough, now. Hack and pierce, fillet, expose every bone—begin. It doesn’t matter where. But begin.

      Describe for example with a grin your horror at this moment, your panic as a recognized customer-friendly purveyor of literature. Stick a skewer in the craftsman you so often maintain you are, and listen with pleasure to the sigh that escapes from the wound like a dirty, despairing fart: ‘Dear me, dear God! I’ve started with the end! His death should have been at the end! For greater symmetry and melancholy pleasure!’

      Laugh your head off at the palette and brushes of the professional painter of the senses you imagine you are, the cat’s tail with which the literary whore whips himself into streamlined production: your bundle of themes. The key-word outline of a possible, hoped-for, future—who knows?—masterpiece. That must be the aim, always. We can’t do it for less. [she, echoing] ‘You’ve got more in you than you think.’

      I have a printout next to me, of my themes. According to calculations from long ago I should by now, on page xx, have long since described our former landlady. Fat Liza was her name, miserliness and unpredictability her fame.

      I should also have long ago depicted our Hardworking Hunchback. He lived round the corner from us. A tough, emaciated man who looked timidly around him, high on his back a shoebox of flesh and spinal cord. At the same time he was the proud father of a dozen offspring, which with the cruelty native to children we called ‘the Humps’. Humps 1, Hump 2, Hump 3 …

      I should also long since have sketched Willy the Shoemaker in detail. He plied his trade half a street further on and was also endowed with a hump, which strengthened me from an early age in the suspicion that overground nuclear tests were once conducted in Waasland. The more so since he was the possessor of a hefty club foot, which he dragged behind him—he could patch up his shoe, which quickly wore out, himself, thus making a saving. Willy had the bushy eyebrows of a devil, the mouth of a monk, the brown eyes of a wounded deer and an echoing house without children which constantly smelt of glue and leather.

      Tear them up. All of them. Joyfully. Your schedules, your memoranda, your reference stuff. Delete, delete. Consign to the Lethe. What matters is spinning around in your head ready to be remembered. From now on go only for the mercurial moment. The random clatter inside your skull. Reap the moment and pick the impromptu. We’ll see where we get to, together.

      For example, begin with what should have been the only true beginning. The starting gun of what is at once a domestic and a universal saga. The intervention of fate.

      The scene takes place in the previously mentioned flat above our former butcher’s shop. Where Fat Liza used to live, into which my parents moved on their retirement, and where later I would have to reach a verdict on each of their possessions. Because of that unity of place the decor actually looks rather familiar. Pieces of jigsaws from different periods that suddenly fit together unexpectedly and unpredictably. Playing jazz must be like this. Suddenly from the mess comes that one crashing chord, unrepeatable, and yet perfectly timed. Sent by favourable chance.

      Gratefully received by the patient musician.

      Or not. What if we no longer need to pay attention to planning or directness? After all, this is the end of the first section. An organ figure would not be out of place. A small tableau vivant, characteristic of the protagonist, while she is still hale and hearty and suspects nothing of the catastrophe that is about to engulf her.

      We shall look for her where we left her. We shall zoom in on the plot among the pollard and the Canada willows, the streams and the earth paths. The balloon flotilla in the sky has gone, floated off to pastures new. The sky has been left empty, an immaculate blue. The canopy of a merciful summer.

      She sits on the ground, in a bathing costume and with that simple band in her hair, rooting about in her vegetable garden on her knees, right next to her famous bungalow, which was built under her supervision and to her design from concrete foundations to corrugated roof by family and friends with too much free time and not enough resistance to her moral and friendly blackmail. (‘You’re coming to help, aren’t you?’ ‘All the others are coming, you know.’ ‘Afterwards there’s a barbecue with satay and scampi.’ ‘Oh no! The foundations have got to be deeper!

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