The venom in her message shocked me. I’d only done what she asked me to. Her intuition had led her to give me this bizarre mission, and now it had turned out a complete failure she blamed me for it. Surely she could have imagined that Clément wouldn’t be happy to have to go through a sort of strange job interview. She knew him better than me, after all. In truth, not only did I understand his reaction, but I agreed with him on one essential point: love is innately risky. Lola was scared, and that was totally understandable. But all romantic relationships contain potential suffering. She could always sleep with a ‘nicer’ boy, but would she feel the same desire for someone like that? This reminded me of a line of dialogue in François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid, a scene that was reprised in The Last Metro:

GÉRARD DEPARDIEUYou’re so beautiful that it hurts to look at you.

GÉRARD DEPARDIEUYou said it was a joy to look at me.

GÉRARD DEPARDIEUIt’s a joy that hurts.

Lola wanted joy without pain, and I had tried to give her that. It was the first time she’d spoken to me and I’d hoped that my mission would lead her to start trusting me. Instead, another member of the Martin family now hated me. Perhaps this was how my book would end, with the five characters loathing and mistrusting the author. Like all those writers who use autobiographical elements in their stories and end up alienating everyone around them. I had to be careful before I was legally barred from publishing the book. Well, at worst, I could change the names. But I hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. There had to be a middle ground between total reality and a lawsuit.

64

I went home, feeling slightly ashamed. I’d just been yelled at by a boy still young enough to be given homework. I had no desire to do anything; just then, writing struck me as the most stupid occupation possible for a human being. Or maybe the second most stupid, after fly-fishing, but I wasn’t even sure about that. Lying on my bed, I thought about sending a message to Marie (despite my resolution to wait for her to write to me first), but even there I felt completely uninspired. You should be able to hire authors who could whisper the right lines to you at the right moment; textperts, digital Cyrano de Bergeracs. In reality, though, nobody could write the message for me, because I didn’t even know what I wanted to say. Even at that low point, I wasn’t desperate enough to send anything as redundant as THINKING OF YOU.

65

Thankfully, an event occurred to balance out the day’s negative energies. Valérie called me to tell me what had happened the previous night. She began by asking me if she was disturbing me, calling so late. I glanced at the time on my phone screen: it was already almost midnight. How was that possible? I’d lost five or six hours in a temporal Bermuda Triangle. My mental ramblings had taken place in a world where hours lasted only minutes. I would often lose myself in the maze of my thoughts, but never before had so much time vanished without trace. In general, time flies when you’re having a lot of fun. But for me, it was the opposite. Boredom fascinates me; it is in the depths of despair that I find myself misplacing whole hours.