Public Enemies (22 page)

Then, once I understood that it was true, that this really was your mother, that she was really talking about you like this and that she was actually giving interviews to announce to all and sundry that she would like to break your teeth with a stick, I tried to think of other bad mothers in the history of literature. I thought of Vitalie Cuif, the “Widow Rimbaud,” that violent “poison,” as her son called her, a frightening creature “more inflexible than seventy-three administrations of numbskulls.” Naturally, I thought of Bazin’s
Folcoche
^*
and of Nerval’s mother. Then, there was Mauriac’s mother in
Génitrix
.
^†
I thought of the horrible Madame Aupick,
^‡
officially good, indeed dripping with niceness, sickly sweet, yet overjoyed, after his aphasia in Brussels, to find her little Charles quite senile, diminished, totally hers. I recalled “Bénédiction,” that terrible poem in which the poet’s mother is “horrified” by what she has given birth to, shouting that she would have preferred to give birth to a “nest of vipers” than the filth that makes up a writer. I vaguely remembered that Beaumarchais’s trilogy ends, after
The Barber of Seville
and
The Marriage of Figaro
, with a play that I’ve never read called
La Mère coupable
[
The Guilty Mother
] and is supposed to tell a
similar story. So I ran through it all again in my mind. I tried to think of the most obscene offerings of this kind in the history of literature. But even then, this is extreme. First, because I’m not sure that there is any greater harpy than your mother, the now famous Lucie Ceccaldi (perhaps in Greek literature—those monstrous mothers, part ogre, that you find in Ovid eating their offspring in a stew or on a skewer, but in modern times, among normal humans, nowadays, no, really, I can’t think of any examples). And then, having a bad mother is one thing, but learning from the press that she considers you a parasite, a phony, a good-for-nothing, human scum (less offspring than outcast) is obviously something else again, and, as far as I know, it has no precedent in any literature.

Finally, I thought about you. Just you. About the fact that you must be suffering, that you might be overwhelmed, grieving, you yourself horrified, enraged, in despair. I remember that you’ve spoken to me of your father, a lot, in fact, and in a way that, as I told you, I found moving. But you’ve said nothing about her or at least almost nothing. Suddenly I was annoyed with myself for not having noticed this, for never asking you about it, for thinking this was normal. I thought of my own mother, such a charming woman, more like Romain Gary’s mother or Albert Cohen’s. I realized how lucky it is—if not for a writer, then at least for a man—to be blessed with a mother of this kind. I tried to put myself in your shoes, to imagine the effect of having this block of violence and hatred at your origin. I thought about calling you. That’s not one of our habits. But I felt like calling you. Just like that. For no reason. Just to hear your news, chat, tell from your voice how you’re getting through this earthquake, so intimate yet public. But then, it was late. In fact, with the time difference, it was very late. I didn’t do it. And here I am writing to you. This
is what I feel like writing to you. This story is so staggering, so unprecedented, this Oedipal murder in reverse and put on display is so unheard of, that I prefer to forget about Comte, Kant, Althusser, the misanthropic generation, Karl Kraus and really let you talk. In chess, that’s what’s called a waiting move.

It’s true that talking about Comte or Althusser these days seems faintly ridiculous to me; worse still, it seems slightly frightening, like the people who count telegraph poles as they’re driving to the hospital trying to forget the fact that their wife has just died, and then spend the rest of their lives counting the slats of the venetian blinds in their nursing home, the tiles in their bathroom … It frightens me because I have witnessed this mechanical intellectual activity that the brain becomes engrossed in in order to repress the central horror; I have witnessed it in old people but I know that it also happens to younger people.

Almost exactly a week ago, my dog, having set out on his own, came back from a walk in a pitiful state; I don’t know how he managed to crawl as far as the door, because his hindquarters were paralyzed and his paws very painful. He was vomiting a lot. He spent several days at the clinic, where the vet gave him cortisone, unsure whether to perform surgery.

At the same time rumors started to circulate, then there were articles on the Internet, about my mother’s book.

I started to get oozing red spots all over my forearms and my legs.

Today my dog is back from the clinic, he is sleeping a lot;
from time to time he opens his eyes and looks at me. For the time being, the vet has advised complete rest. I hope that he will completely recover but I’m not sure. I could say much the same thing about myself.

You’re right, dear Bernard-Henri, to note that the affair of the “now famous Lucie Ceccaldi,” as you call her, evokes a maleficence greater than that of bad mothers in modern literature; of course it is possible to cite repulsive creatures from the darkest depths of Greek mythology. Others might think of the monstrous Baba Yaga in Slavic folklore, who smashes the skulls of newborns to feed on their brains. There are a number of similar tales among African tribes too. The same things must exist in most cultures as long as you go back to the point before patriarchy took over, where the right of life and death over one’s progeny, the right to carve up, to devour one’s children, belonged to the mother.

What I simply wanted to say to you is that this ancestral age, the prehistory of humanity, we are living it right now in our postmodern civilizations. The conflict between mother and child is absolute, uncompromising, from the moment of conception: it is the mother and no one else who decides whether or not to have an abortion. One of the questions I’m most often asked by people who know about the business is: “But why didn’t your mother have an abortion? She was a doctor, she would have had the contacts.” I don’t resent the question, it occurs to them spontaneously and obviously a few seconds later they feel embarrassed. I’m not questioning the right to abortion, I’m not questioning anything, I’m just explaining.

Not only did my mother not have an abortion, but, a few years later, she
reoffended
; she had another child with another man, then off-loaded her daughter in circumstances rather worse than she did me (I think she literally abandoned the child or something, one way or the other the name of
Ceccaldi was wiped from the records of my sister, but I’d rather be vague about it; I don’t think she would want me to talk about it).

At a certain point during pregnancy, women are often good-humored and in excellent physical condition. That’s what it must have been, I suppose; she
got a kick
out of being pregnant, but the breastfeeding, the diapers, no thanks.

I haven’t seen my mother many times in my life, fifteen at most, but the day she truly disgusted me was the day she told me that, in La Réunion, she had run into my old Malagasy nanny who had asked after me. She thought it was funny, inappropriate, that my old Malagasy nanny should ask her about me after thirty years; I found it incredibly touching, but I didn’t even try to explain it to her.

One senses that there is in the chaotic, absurd life of Lucie Ceccaldi something terribly, appallingly
contemporary
.

If only the spiritual channel-hopping; just think, in the space of a few years, I watched this woman convert from communist to Hindu and then Muslim (not counting some minor Gurdjieff-style bullshit); but even so, I got a shock in her interview with
Lire
to hear she now refers to herself as an “orthodox Christian.”

And most of all, of course, her absolute inability to sacrifice anything for her children; her inability to accept the fact that people die and their children live on. Anyway, things like that are pretty common nowadays, which means that Europe’s demographic decline doesn’t exactly come as bad news; but back in her day they were pretty rare.

She is, all in all, an absolutely self-centered creature of real but limited intelligence, and someone that I can’t even bring myself to hate. She’s right, for example, when she says that I was much better off with my grandmother, a woman she elsewhere calls a “hateful prole” (something that cast an interesting
light on her own communist affiliation). I owe both my grandmothers many happy years of childhood; my sister, I believe, was not so lucky.

To this premature abandonment I also owe the fact that my earliest childhood was filled with images of women other than the rather repellent one of my mother. There were my grandmothers, of course; there were also my aunts, my father’s sisters, with whom I spent much more time than I ever did with my biological mother. And before words, before memories, there was my Malagasy nanny, and maybe others. People are not very particular about love, I think, we take it where we find it.

So you see the situation, in a sense, is not as serious as you imagined (I can understand that she might appear to be a monster to someone who had a tender, loving mother; but that’s not something that appears on my mental landscape). What is absolutely despicable, on the other hand, and you’re right, unprecedented, is that the reams of threats and insults from my mother come to me
through the press
.

For this there is no excuse; this goes beyond banal self-centeredness and becomes pure spite. A few months ago, I got an e-mail from my sister in which she told me our mother wanted to meet with both of us, so we could talk, could forgive each other, something like that. I accepted, though I wasn’t really keen on the idea; there was talk of meeting in late January or early February. And after that I didn’t hear anything. I was a little surprised. Now I understand: in the meantime, my mother had found a publisher.

I can quite easily imagine what the book itself is like. She recounts her journey “through the century,” as some journalist at
Le Monde
called it. (I don’t know this Florence Noiville, but she seems incredibly stupid … that perky, hackneyed tone—“Lucie Ceccaldi is certainly a hell of a character!” and
so on.) I am sure she reveals (it is over four hundred pages, after all) how adventurous, how fascinating her life has been, sometimes difficult, but always fascinating, in every country in the world, with the most extraordinary characters from all walks of life. Given that the book was revised by the journalist Demonpion, it’s bound to be a piece of shit.

It’s pretty scary that the old cow found a publisher; but where I might start to
somatize
is when I see the way the journalists, like vultures, swoop on the most putrid, the most sordid passages. It will go on for a while longer. And when they’re bored with it, or rather when they’re worried that the public are bored of it, they’ll hold their noses and say, “This whole Houellebecq thing is really rather sordid,” and it will be as though I set the whole thing up.

On every level, the relationship between me and the quasi-totality of the media in this country has reached the point of all-out hatred, in the same sense as your talk about “all-out war” (rather a strange war, incidentally, given that I am unarmed; it would be fairer to say
an all-out war of extermination directed at me
). Obviously, no one is actually interested in my mother, except maybe Florence Noiville, assuming she is as dumb as she seems. It is
me
they are trying to bring down through her, and from now on, I shouldn’t have any illusions: they’ll stop at nothing, there will be no quarter given. The separation between private life and public, between the author and the work? It’s all too complicated, nobody worries about scruples like that these days.

I think what I am going through is something similar to what medieval criminals did when they were pilloried. The word has been so overused that we’ve forgotten the horror of the thing itself. The condemned man was exposed on a public
square, head imprisoned in a wooden frame, hands fettered, face exposed, and any passerby could slap him in the face, spit at him, or worse.

Three years ago, wounded at hearing Demonpion on the radio repeating the story that I “lied by telling
Les Inrockuptibles
that my mother was dead,” I tried to set the story straight. I had had the information from my sister, who had heard it from her father (who still lives in La Réunion). So I went to the effort of asking my sister to write a letter explaining all this, and it was published in the readers’ letters section of
Les
Inrockuptibles
; the story got almost no publicity whatever.

Much more recently, persuaded by your example, I thought that it might be interesting for me to find out what people were saying about me, “to know my adversary’s position.” But in my case, there’s no point anymore: my adversaries are everywhere.

Oh, of course there are a few exceptions; but the exceptions are strange and difficult to understand; in fact, that is exactly what they are,
exceptions
. It’s curious, for example, to think that
Paris Match
is the only general-interest magazine that has so far refrained from commenting on my private life. It’s also notable that women’s magazines (with the exception of one or two) have always shown enormous tact on the subject.