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Time passed and I was still alone in the living room. So I had no choice. It was time for:

INTERESTING ANECDOTESABOUT KARL LAGERFELD (1)⁷

Throughout his life, Lagerfeld kept some of the furniture from his childhood bedroom. That was what Madeleine had told me. I found this detail fascinating, and I am not using that word just to increase the excitement of this passage designed to fill a narrative gap. No, I find it all the more intriguing since he did not associate childhood with happiness. I remember an interview in which he said that the austere atmosphere of Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon had reminded him of his own childhood. After a little more research, I also came across this Lagerfeld quote in the newspaper Libération: ‘I found the condition of being a child humiliating.’ That gives us a glimpse of what he lived through. So, of course, we have to wonder about his desire to keep belongings from the room where he lived during that period. It has been said that an artist is an adult who always looks back at his childhood, but this is different. I am one of those people who believe that objects carry within them vibrations of the past; just like walls, streets or trees. So the little desk that he kept throughout his life was, in a way, the first to behold his genius. It was where he made his first designs, the origin of his creative world. Lagerfeld wanted to keep close to him not the object of an era he rejected, but the material witness to his artistic birth. (The human equivalent of this would be to keep your mum with you forever.)

1. 7. As promised, whenever I sensed a lowering of the narrative tension, or whenever my characters were not giving me what I needed to sustain the reader’s interest, I would use Karl Lagerfeld.

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Apparently, telling a story is enough to make a story happen, because it was in the middle of this Lagerfeld anecdote that Jérémie appeared. Unlike his elusive sister, he sat down next to me. Emboldened, I asked if I could visit his bedroom. He agreed, but I quickly sensed that he was the type of person who said yes to everything in order to spare himself the bother of conversation. It was a way of saving words. And when he did speak, he never really finished his sentences; there was something incomplete about him. To be more precise: he himself did not seem very interested in what he was saying.

This is, I imagine, a fairly common condition. Adolescence is an age when one’s sense of self takes a beating. A phenomenon that can perhaps be explained in this way: often, childhood is a kingdom where the child is the centre of the world. Unwittingly, parents swell their children’s egos out of all proportion. They rush to meet their every need, judge every scribble a work of genius, and go into ecstasies about every ridiculous dance routine. In other words, children feel as if they are touched by grace, and their illusion is sadly shattered when they reach the truth of adolescence: they are merely themselves. Surely puberty would prove less traumatic if we were to surround humans from their earliest days with a less narcissistic reality. Jérémie, like all adolescents, was akin to a pop star who had enjoyed several big chart hits but was now going through a more complex period where the public no longer seemed interested in him. So he found himself at a stage in life when, despite not having really lived, he felt like a has-been. Adolescents think they are afraid of the future, when really they are mourning the loss of the past.