Valérie had invited me here to lighten the pressure on her mother, but perhaps also because she thought my presence would breathe new life into her family. Surely they were bound to be tickled by the absurdity of the situation? Nothing of the kind occurred, however, and I remained an intruder. I could sense that Valérie was trying to conceal her disappointment. Her son wasn’t playing along. As for her daughter, Valérie knew in advance that she would make no effort. She had whispered to me as I entered the apartment: ‘Lola’s at a difficult age. She never wants to do anything with us any more.’

I can’t say that Lola was unpleasant towards me, she was just completely indifferent. Her entire face radiated the desperate desire to be somewhere else. She was there without being there, to the point that I felt as if I were sitting opposite Malevich’s painting of a white square on top of another white square.

She was seventeen and she didn’t know what she wanted to do when she left school. According to her mother, this was a source of anxiety for Lola.

On that first evening, she refused to introduce herself, saying simply: ‘I don’t want you to write about me. That’s my right.’

Of course, this immediately made me want to find out more. During dinner, I observed her on several occasions without managing to form an opinion. She might be sad, boring, intense, secretly enthralled, blasé, dreamy, melancholic, ambitious, creative … how could I know? Perhaps even she herself didn’t know. Destiny, at her age, often looks like a rough sketch. She glanced at me a few times with eyes that seemed quite hard (‘Who is this guy?’) but I sensed a certain vulnerability (‘Him and his stupid project are really getting on my nerves’). Deep down, I enjoyed wondering who she was and how she would develop in my book; it didn’t bother me particularly if I had to wait until Chapter 45 or Chapter 114 to discover more about her. In fact she seemed very much like the kind of character who first appears in the middle of a novel, sparking a new storyline.

13

This dinner had not kept all its promises, but I could hardly expect every second spent with my characters to feed the literary beast. It was a project that had to bloom slowly, as things do in real life, with its silences and its moments that do not move the narrative along. Later, I could always decide to cut any really dull parts. Who would believe the account of a life that was always exciting, anyway? For most of our daily life, we weave adventures around the edges of boredom. I had to be satisfied with what they had shared with me so far, and to consider this a highly promising beginning. I was very keen on that idea of promise.

Given how dinner had gone, Valérie suggested that we meet for lunch the next day. She would be more free to talk to me. She wasn’t wrong: I had underestimated that essential fact. There was probably little point in trying to interview all my protagonists at the same time. Encountered separately, they would be far more likely to open up; a bit like in those police interrogations where the suspects are questioned one by one so they can’t compare stories or intimidate each other into silence.