Invisible Love (23 page)

It all starts with an image: two men unite in secret during a wedding ceremony. At first, the two couples—one glowing before the altar, the other hidden in the darkness of the back row—are brought together by sheer chance, but the clandestine couple will keep an eye out for the official couple.

This story has given me the chance to explore the differences between a homosexual and a heterosexual couple, the joys and sorrows specific to each, some of them diametrically opposed. Having completed my first draft, I have realized, somewhat to my surprise, that the happier of the two couples was perhaps not the one sanctioned by society and fêted in the church square.

When a man and a woman are joined in matrimony, they are under intense external pressure: their conjugal life is both encouraged and imposed, there are models to follow, a philosophy to be obeyed. But when two men set up home together, they are venturing on a terrain with few signposts, especially as society often rejects their union, or, when it does tolerate it, expects nothing of it. There is a paradoxical freedom in living a life that is either forbidden or scorned.

 

*

 

Is this a purely homosexual form of suffering?

A love that, however strong, however great, however long-lasting, does not produce a child . . .

Of course, infertility doesn't affect only homosexuals—there are heterosexuals who cannot have children—but it does affect all homosexuals.

 

*

 

I have finished writing “ Two Gentlemen from Brussels.”

I'm not sure how to classify this story. Is it a novella or a long short story?

 

*

 

Some encouraging reactions from those who read it. “Two Gentlemen from Brussels” touches people who have very different attitudes.

I'm pleased, but the question remains: what to do with the story?

Publish it as it is or wait until there are other stories I can combine it with? But which ones and why?

 

*

 

For once, I have asked myself a question that has an answer.

The two men I wrote about in “Two Gentlemen from Brussels” have cousins, and they have introduced them to me . . . Other stories have appeared, linked by a similar theme: invisible loves.

 

*

 

One story conceals another. If you catch the first one, you have a good chance of spotting those that follow.

A book of short stories is a series of game animals hunted in a particular territory. Although the stories may vary, they also have a lot in common.

If they didn't, putting them together would be an arbitrary business. I think of my books of short stories not as collections or anthologies, but as works composed organically. So I am going to give the stories that will eventually make up this volume the overall title
Invisible Love
.

 

*

 

What has intrigued me in writing the title story is the idea of oblique feelings: feelings we don't admit either to ourselves or to our nearest and dearest, feelings that, although they are present in us, although they may stir us to action, are nevertheless located on the edges of our consciousness. In the title story, for example, Jean and Laurent experience virtual femininity through their fascination with Geneviève, then virtual fatherhood through keeping an eye on young David.

Their lives are based on an underlying architecture of feelings, one that is not formulated, one that is immaterial, but that nevertheless gives structure and support to the whole edifice. Many of our aspirations and desires are fulfilled symbolically.

 

*

 

We all live two lives—one real, the other imaginary.

And these two lives are like Siamese twins, more closely interlinked than we might think, because the parallel world often reshapes reality and even changes it.

This will be the theme of this new book of short stories: virtual lives that lie in the background of a real life.

 

 

* * *

 

 

I write the next story in the volume, “The Dog,” with genuine passion. It has two sources: my personal life and some reflections I had, when I was a doctoral student at the École Normale in the 1980s, on reading the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas.

My personal life: I have always lived with animals and I hope to enjoy their company until the day I die. For some years now, three Shiba Inu dogs have been my writing companions—at this very moment, the male is lying by my feet under the desk, while the two females are sprawled nearby—one on the rug and the other one on her bed. My music companions too, since they come running whenever I play the piano, get under the instrument to feel the vibrations, and listen to Chopin, not just with their ears, but with their whole bodies. They are also my companions during walks and games . . . When I talk to them, I talk to souls that have intelligence, sensitivity, feelings, and memory. Far from using them as toys, I treat them like people—people I cherish and who adore me. Even though some regard my attitude with disapproval, I am constantly trying to make them happy. Didn't I say I love them?

My intellectual life: At the age of twenty, I was struck by an essay about animals by Emmanuel Lévinas called “Nom d'un chien,” published in his collection
Difficile liberté
. In it he recounts how, while a prisoner in a Nazi labor camp, he was paid a visit by a stray dog. The exuberant animal did not look askance at Jews as inferior beings or “subhumans,” but would wag its tail at them as though they were normal men. “The last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brains necessary to universalize the maxims of his instincts,” this dog gave him back his lost humanity.

This essay is all the more surprising in that it virtually contradicts his philosophy.

It is Emmanuel Lévinas's contention that the basic experience of humanity is that of the face. A human face looks at another human face and enters into an intersubjective relationship. In it, he sees not eyes, but a look, because “the best way to meet another person is not even to notice the color of his eyes! When you notice the color of his eyes, you are not in a social relationship with the other person.” At that moment he recognizes in the other person a person who is not him, he sees a fellow human being, someone worthy of respect, someone who must not be put to death. I shudder at the idea that the experience of a face is an ethical experience. “The face is that which you cannot kill, or at least whose meaning is ‘Thou shalt not kill.' Murder, admittedly, is an everyday event: one can kill someone else; ethical standards are not an ontological necessity. The taboo against killing does not make murder impossible, although the authority of the taboo is maintained in the guilty conscience engendered by the committing of an evil deed—the malignity of evil.” (
Ethics and Infinity
). The Nazis stopped at this experience of the face when they considered Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and cripples as being on the level of inferior animals. Yet, “‘Thou shalt not kill' is the first word of the face. And it is an order. In the appearance of the face there is a commandment, as if a master were speaking.”

The strangeness of barbarism. It eludes lived experience. It blinds itself.

A dog, though, is incapable of it.

Does that make it more human than human beings? It is certainly not racist. And it is never perverted by ideology.

But why does a dog see a face that the executioners cannot see? And does a dog have a face?

When he was asked this, Lévinas evaded the question. His experience as a prisoner fêted by a stray dog remained marginal to his thought.

My lecturer at the École Normale, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, dared to go further in one of his last essays, in which he recounts how his cat saw him naked and he suddenly felt ashamed. Someday I'll come back to that . . .

 

*

 

The end of the story “The Dog” is about forgiveness.

Forgiveness?

Nothing strikes me as more difficult.

Here, my protagonist, Dr. Samuel Heymann, manages, thanks to his dog, to grasp the humanity that still exists in the traitor and turn his back on revenge. I admire his strength, which reminds me of a real person I have been much concerned with in the past few years: Otto, the father of Anne Frank.

Currently, at the Théâtre Rive-Gauche, under the direction of Steve Suissa, a company of actors, including Francis Huster, is rehearsing the play I wrote based on
The Diary of Anne Frank
. Thanks to the historians of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the members of the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, I discovered that Otto Frank never did anything to encourage an investigation into who gave him and his family and his friends away when they were hiding in the annex. In my play, when another character is outraged by the fact that a bastard can sleep peacefully after sending eight people to their deaths, Otto goes so far as to say, “I pity his children.”

Otto Frank did not want to add violence to violence. He saw a certain kind of justice not as fairness, but as revenge. That is really sublime.

Too much so?

I don't know. If someone attacks my family, I'm quite capable of murder.

I'm not worthy of my own characters.

 

*

 

I have finished “The Dog” in a state of great emotion.

Although I started out thinking that Samuel Heymann was very different from me—apart from the gratitude he feels toward his dogs—I wonder if he doesn't carry within him my own latent misanthropy, the misanthropy I try to suppress.

Let us be clear about this: I'm known to be inquisitive and cheerful, I love mankind in all its complexity, I enjoy meeting new people, I'm passionate about both individuals and books—otherwise I wouldn't be a novelist, a playwright, or a reader—yet my faith in human beings has its ups and downs. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen with some regularity, that I have to use all my willpower to remember that I love the human race even though its violence, its injustice, its stupidity, its shilly-shallying, its indifference to beauty, and above all its acceptance of mediocrity shock me.

One must love mankind . . . but how hard mankind is to love! Just as one cannot be an optimist without knowing pessimism intimately, one cannot love mankind without hating it a little. A feeling always carries its opposite. It's up to each of us to choose the right one.

 

 

* * *

 

 

What joy! Here I am, rubbing shoulders with Mozart again. I suppose he is the most important man in my life—I'm talking here of the dead—a man who provokes a sense of wonder, an appreciation of beauty, joy, and energy, a man who leads me to an awed approval of mystery.

This time, I'm not giving him French words, as I did with
The Marriage of Figaro
and
Don Giovanni
, or recounting
My Life with Mozart
, but writing a story in which he is a constant but invisible presence.

I am astonished by the speed with which, after his death, Mozart moves from obscurity into the limelight. A man who wears himself out in his desperate search for money, commissions, recognition, a man who is buried at the age of thirty-five in a common grave with nobody attending the funeral, but who, within two decades, is considered the symbol of musical genius throughout Europe, raised to the heights of fame, where he has remained ever since.

What happened?

Mozart was an eighteenth-century composer whose true career was in the nineteenth century. Even though he died in 1791, he was the first nineteenth-century composer, the embodiment of the new artist. Picked out and loved by other composers—such as Haydn, who said of him that he was “the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name”—he enjoyed a particular aura during the Romantic era because those who came after him, first Beethoven, Rossini, and Weber, then Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Berlioz, became independent creators. Fulfilling Mozart's wish, they freed themselves from those in power and took the arbitration of taste away from kings, princes and aristocrats: it was they who now dictated what was good and bad in music. Mozart became their composer, a composers' composer. Then he was adopted by the people and became everyone's composer.

His widow, Constanze Mozart, née Weber, and Baron Nissen, her second husband, played an important role in this process, since during those years they catalogued his works and had them published and performed.

Historians disagree on who was the more influential of the two. Most, taking their cue from Mozart's father and sister, see Constanze merely as a charming but scatterbrained woman, incapable of acting responsibly, practically, or consistently. Some recent biographers of Constanze, though, have tried to rehabilitate her by highlighting the work she did for Mozart after his death.

The more we look into the question, the more we realize what a significant role Baron Nissen played. He did not just help Constanze: this Danish diplomat, at once meticulous, passionate, and opinionated, sorted through the scores, wrote to publishers, and negotiated contracts on her behalf; he even obtained Constance's signature in order to manage everything concerning Mozart; last but not least, bringing together records and eyewitness accounts, he undertook, of his own accord, to write a major biography of Mozart. And it is in this book that he rehabilitates Constanze, his wife, as Mozart's wife—in opposition to the slanderous assertions of Mozart's sister Nannerl. His defense of Constanze is both logical and strange. Logical because he lives with her. Strange because he lives with his rival's ghost.

It is tempting to find this situation amusing, as Antoine Blondin did, or to look for some hidden explanation—repressed homosexuality, according to Jacques Tournier in
Le Dernier des Mozart
. In my case, what fascinates me is the mystery of how a man can be so passionate about another man who was his wife's first husband.