Pianelli left without further ado and I slowly wandered back to join my friends. It took a long time for me to accept that we no longer had anything to fear. When I reached the top of the driveway, I glanced at the article again. Looking closely at my mother in the photograph, I saw that she was holding a key ring. Probably the keys to the fucking gym. The keys to the past, but also those that opened the door to the future.

The Novelist’s Privilege

In front of me is a Bic Cristal pen that cost thirty centimes and a ruled Seyes notebook. The only weapons I have ever owned.

I am sitting in the school library, in the same place where I always sat back then, a small alcove with a view of the courtyard and the ivy-covered fountain. The reading room is suffused with the smell of wax and melted candles. Old Lagarde et Michard grammar manuals are gathering dust on the shelves.

After Zélie retired, the school administration asked me if they could name the building where the drama club met in my honor. I declined and instead proposed that they name it after Jean-Christophe Graff, but I agreed to give a short inaugural speech to the students.

I take off the pen cap and I start to make notes. This is what I have done all my life. Write. It is a twofold, contradictory gesture: building walls and opening doors. Walls to hold back the devastating cruelty of the real world, doors to escape into a parallel world—into reality not as it is, but as it should be.

It does not always work, but sometimes, for a few hours, fiction is genuinely more powerful than life. This, perhaps, is the privilege of artists in general and novelists in particular—occasionally being able to win their battles against the real.

I write, I cross out, I rewrite. The ink-blackened pages accumulate. Gradually a story takes shape. An alternative story to explain what really happened on that night in December 1992.