15

I had strange dreams that night. The entire Martin family was angry with me; they were even threatening to kill me. This was the first time I’d ever been persecuted by my characters. Yet I felt as if I’d acted respectfully, that I hadn’t done anything without their consent. Why did my subconscious feel so tormented? Writing is a form of betrayal. Becoming a writer is the fate of the guilty. Perhaps I was anticipating a moment yet to occur, when my characters would rebel against what I’d written about them. I woke with the sour taste of a premonition in my mouth.

16

Valérie had suggested I meet her at work so we could have lunch together. She seemed to have taken my project to heart, and this made me even more sure that I had been right to accept her proposal. All the same, I wasn’t about to abandon my initial source; I was planning to visit Madeleine that afternoon. My life now consisted of nothing but meetings with members of the same family.

As I left my apartment, I saw the travel agency woman outside, smoking a cigarette. The woman I had thought, the day before, might have been my heroine. What if I wrote a second book, in parallel, about her? I could follow several stories and then pick the most interesting … No, impossible. I had to stay faithful to my original idea, and more than that, to chance. I immediately abandoned these thoughts of literary infidelity.

Anyway, in a bookish sense, I liked Valérie. I’d always been attracted to characters who were neither one thing nor the other. Not happy, not unhappy, but stagnating in a strange zone in between, where the question of personal fulfilment becomes lost in the maze of the passing years. And yet you sense that this cannot go on. The accumulated frustrations are starting to become unbearable. You sense that it all could blow up at any moment. The smile with which she greeted me only accentuated this feeling. I saw her waving to me even though she was quite a long way off, at the back of the school playground. She walked quickly towards me, as if relieved to have an opportunity to flee her workplace for an hour.

She usually ate at the school cafeteria, in a room for teachers only. They would talk about the students and their problems, which meant she never really got a break from work. Valérie could have eaten lunch alone in a nearby restaurant, to give herself some breathing space. But if anyone had seen her, it might not have looked good. They might have seen her solo dining arrangement as a form of disobedience to the diktat of collective responsibility. The need for solitude is often considered antisocial. Human relations are complicated, and sometimes we go against our own desires to avoid having to justify the choices we have made. So Valérie never took time out for herself at lunch, instead submitting to the unspoken obligation to spend it with her colleagues. This explained her enthusiasm. The fact that she had a meeting ‘outside’ was a legitimate excuse to leave her post, a perfect alibi.