His Final Pages

By Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud

Translated from French by Edward Gauvin

Night falls. These pages will likely be my last. In a way, they will also be my first. And yet my books are everywhere. I owe them fame and fortune, but also the note of ambiguous despair on which my life now nears its end.

This much I have always known: to write is a disgrace. Don’t they know, who boast of it naively, that in every age it has mainly drawn the weak and mediocre, the spineless, eccentric, and effeminate, who found no other fitting activity? A man sound of mind and body does not write; he acts on, delights in, the real. Blessed are they who forget—screwdriver, bazooka, or slide rule in hand—the ulcerous idleness of the universe, which unveils itself upon the slightest inspection. When I was thirty, the air that seemed to intoxicate everyone else gave me no joy to breathe. I was waiting for that illness to declare itself, the illness that would save me: a book.

***

Wealth would come later, but already, back then, I did not want for money. My aunts, for love of the chubby, cheery baby I’d been, had appointed me their only heir. When they died, I was free of any attachments, personal or professional. There was nothing keeping me in Paris, nothing luring me anywhere else. Hawaii? Tahiti? The Seychelles? Acapulco? Or just plain old Nice? The world was my oyster, but I couldn’t care less. I ended up settling in Eparvay.

Eparvay, or France at its most down home and familiar. Which wasn’t unpleasant—just another kind of slumber. But I’ve given up trying to figure out just how it was, over a decade ago, that I picked out from a few hundred housing ads the one that led me there. After all, I spent whole nights considering it carefully at first. I even hired a private eye to look into the landlady. She turned out to be exactly as she seemed: a harmless old lady, all alone and going blind. Of course, I’ve even wondered about this suspicious, perhaps even symbolic, half-blindness… but what of it? The old lady who’d put up the ad was in fact a bit simple, and almost blind, like fate.

An appointment was made. I went to meet her. But how could I ever have done anything else? She welcomed me kindly, and after serving me a cup of tea, showed me around. Only later did I buy her out; that day, all we signed was a lease. That day, I became the tenant of that neglected little property, those walls thick with ivy, that fragile roof (which worried me no end), and along with the rest of the furniture, that armoire and its contents, of which I knew nothing. I was already less a tenant than a prisoner; I just didn’t know it yet. For the next ten years, tormented by such anxiety that I made every trip as short as I could, I was not to leave the house more than fifteen times.

***

The next morning, I set to work. All night, I’d sailed a dusky sea in dreams—my life, no doubt. In the lighted isle I was doing my best to reach despite tides that turned me endlessly aside, I saw, upon waking, the image of that peaceful home where I hoped at last to make my calling a reality. And so, at a very early hour, I set up my office in the very room where I now write these lines. It was furnished with a desk, shelves, and an armoire. Only the books have changed. Back then, the shelves sheltered only paperbacks and trade journals my predecessor had left behind. On the desk were a dried-out inkwell, scattered objects, a leather blotter. I took the cover off my typewriter and set it on a shelf, waiting, right by the pot of mint tea I’d brought up from the kitchen. Then I sat down and lined my pens up in front of me, my pencils, my erasers, my glue, my scissors, my staplers, my tchotchkes, and finally a cheap ream of paper for early drafts and another more expensive ream for later ones.

It was raining. I got up to open the window and stayed there a while, staring at the muddy puddles in the alley, the chestnut trees, the stone nymph that rose from a pool of such modest size that when she showed it to me, the old lady had called it a ha’penny pond. I realized I would not write. I shut the window and went back for a sip of tea. Standing in front of the desk, I untidied the objects I’d just arranged with such maniacal care. For years I’d been waiting for this moment, and now… nothing. The same old frustrated impotence, the same sourceless fatigue.

I was about to leave the room and take to bed, as I’d always done, when my gaze fell on the armoire. Just what was in there, anyway? Rags? Books? Family photos? Nothing at all? There was no key in the lock. I tried opening the door. It wouldn’t budge. I could’ve given up. What did I care? I could’ve left it all behind and grabbed the first train to Paris, and there—or anywhere else at all—kept on trying to write. Maybe I might even have managed. Maybe I passed my true fate by that day, another body of work that would have been mine alone?

Armed with a paper knife, seized with unaccountable fervor, I started prodding around in the lock. The rusted iron squeaked at the blade. Splinters of wood leapt from the side of the door at the pressure I exerted. Finally the bolt gave way, and the door opened, creaking. Two shelves were taken up with big black leatherbound tomes like accounting ledgers, flat on their dusty backs. I picked up the first to the left, on the top shelf. Instead of the columns of figures I was expecting, I read these words on the first page, in the green ink of a decorative hand:

Ananke

or

All Things to All People

A Novel

A novel. The manuscript of a novel. No author listed, and a subject that, to go by the subtitle, was curiously close to my own concerns. I shut the book and gave the binding a good smack to clear off some of the dust. Then I set to reading the first chapter. I read three or four pages straight, still standing, before sitting down at last to continue more comfortably. As to the quality of the work, my mind was made up. When it comes to style, what dazzles some inspires only sniffs of disdain in others. Let’s just say I would’ve readily stuck my left hand in a bonfire to be able to write like this.

When it came to dating the manuscript, the look of the paper, the ink’s faded green, the condition of the binding—all these led one to believe it must have been written a good fifty years ago. And yet the tone, the style, even down to the mindset peeking through—nothing in the work supported such an estimate, so strongly did it give off the here and now. And something else bothered me. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but the nausea-tinged pleasure I took in reading it should have warned me. The manuscript felt like me. I could, from that moment on, have recognized my horizon, my viewpoints, my slopes and abysses. An entire inner panorama, till then pondered and dwelled on in vain—and the author of this novel had somehow managed to reconstruct its exact topography.

My tea was cold. I dashed back down to the kitchen to brew a new pot, hands moving mechanically, head in a daze. My discovery had taken me over completely. The two shelves had to hold enough material for a good twenty or so books. Was it the work of a former tenant, or the landlady’s late husband, or her son, a dilettante genius whose work had never set foot outside the house where it had been written? How to be sure? As much as we might read, we have never read everything. Perhaps the author of these volumes was not so unknown as all that. Perhaps he wasn’t unknown at all.

My tea ready, I returned to my reading. The morning, then the afternoon, flew by. I was still at it when night fell. Around ten, I supped on a trifle and took to bed with two manuscripts. When the neighbor’s rooster woke me up the next morning, I felt like I was no longer my own person. In forcing the door to the armoire, I’d set something in motion. Like a boulder long poised precariously on a peak, some fatefulness had shaken loose and was sliding now, if only slowly still.

Besides the house I was renting, my elderly landlady also had a little apartment in town, where she lived with her cat and her piano. She regularly entertained a small circle of friends, and had invited me to “honor with my presence” her next get-together, which had been postponed till next Sunday due to my arrival. There would be conversation, singing around the piano, games of whist. I’d accepted out of politeness, but now told myself this might be a chance to glean some information about the manuscripts.

I spent the bulk of my time on them. Sometimes, to get some air, I’d go for a walk. It was often raining. On the paths around Eparvay, alone, sullen, haunted by thoughts of the abandoned body of work, I squelched through the slick mud overflowing the waterlogged fields. Some slow labor was taking place inside me. As the days passed, and the reception my landlady had invited me to drew near, I grew to dread the moment when she might unburden herself of the secret of the armoire. An insinuating complicity had set in between me and the author of the manuscripts. Time and again, about to turn a page, I’d be unable to stop myself from finishing the sentence at its bottom. And almost word for word, I’d be right. These coincidences—their frequency, their regularity—which amused me at first, soon began to terrify. For indeed, nothing could be less predictable than the way this unknown author turned his phrases. Under a facade of sober classicism was a constant toing and froing between reason and absurdity. A “rumpled classicism” might have been the most fitting description.

The party was set for Sunday afternoon. Friday morning, as I was exploring the ruins of a farm a few miles from Eparvay, the first lines of a poem came to me—inspired, I thought, by the desolation of my surroundings. But no sooner had I jotted the stanza in my notebook than its rhythm and overall style reminded me of the unknown author’s, though I had till now read only his prose. As soon as I got back, I began going through the ledgers for anything that looked like a poem. And in the seventh, found a dozen or so. The unknown author had gathered them under a mysterious title, Flaming Nothing, and the first opened with the four lines I’d written down.

Was I possessed? The effects of solitude, perhaps? My nerves had always been fragile. But the verse in question was right there in my notebook for all to see, and differed by not a single word from the one in the ledger. There was no room for doubt. In my examination of the manuscripts, I had proceeded in order; besides, the ledgers were numbered. The first four, which I’d read, were stacked on the desk to my right. The fifth, which I was partway through—well, when I set it down, it was usually to my right as well. The sixth was still in the armoire, leaning against the eight, since I had the seventh in my hands. There was no way I could have read these lines before. Of course, the possibility remained that they might have been published in some journal I’d come across before. And so they’d have come back to mind when I visited the farm… But no, I didn’t believe it. I was sure of my memory… and my wits? Like most men, I had always ruled and been ruled by my folly in equal parts. Or so I told myself. No, some divination had happened, perhaps even osmosis, but I had never read these lines before this day.

That afternoon, as I was rereading ‘Ananke’, or ‘All Things to All People’, I paused to examine the unknown author’s handwriting. It was of an absolute, improbable consistency: every a just like the ones before and after, no tisten on a t darker than another. I don’t know what an expert would have made of it, but I for my part could imagine no creature of flesh and blood behind these impeccable words and lines. That afternoon, little by little, the certainty crept over me that this oeuvre born of nothingness was waiting for its author. An empty shell, it would welcome the first consciousness to dare, like a hermit crab, slip inside and make itself at home.

***

The next day—Saturday—and Sunday morning, too, I refrained from reading. I’d decided not to resist anymore. The adventure would lead me where it wished; I gave myself over to it. Around four, as I made my way dutifully to my landlady’s, the fear touched me, ever so lightly, that with a word, a name, she would bring the fragile scaffolding of my predestination crashing down. Deep down, I was already certain no such thing awaited.

I was received with little cries of delight. I held out my flowers, my petits fours, my bubbly; was met rapture and gratitude. There were very nice old men excited by the presence of a “young Parisian writer” among them. For a moment I was ashamed of the fuss they made over a status I felt was usurped. And yet I played the game. I couldn’t let my landlady down, nor jeopardize my chances of getting the explanations I hoped for from these good people. I was a good guest, trying hard to win their confidence with the anecdotes I invented as needed. I steered the conversation toward my landlady’s former tenants as much as I could. I soon saw this was a dead end. A trust-funded radical socialist, a professorial couple (physics, chemistry)… I switched tactics. An editor considering an anthology of forgotten authors had tasked me with scouting for him. The provinces were always brimming with hidden talents. Couldn’t they help me flush out a few? Brows creased all around me. Well, there’d been that doctor’s son… Yes, he’d played at being a writer one whole winter, then packed it in. Let’s see… there was also Mr. Dagre. A serious author, to be sure. His monographs on the region. Oh yes, especially A View of the Universal Exposition from Eparvay, or his poems, quite fine and sensitive, Dawns in Eparvay. These drew a blank with me. Relieved, I promised to read over Mr. Dagre’s writings attentively, as well as the prose poems of young Dominique, published in the local high school’s journal, Echo.

I didn’t dare monopolize the conversation too much. A gentlemen with a red ribbon wished at all costs to tell me about the day the recruits left Eparvay in July 1915, and I had to listen. Then the old lady played piano and I joined the choir of trembling voices as they sang, “I know a church / in a village fair / the river reflects / its steeple there.”

When it came time for cards, I picked my landlady’s table. My inquiries into the local litterateurs had gone nowhere. But there was still the armoire. If the old lady had wanted to keep its contents a secret, surely she wouldn’t have left it in the office to avoid any possible indiscretion. Unless she’d grown careless with age? I had only to raise the subject and watch for her reaction. She didn’t blink. That worthless old thing? She’d lost the key, but anyway, it was empty. If I wanted to use it, all I had to do was force the lock; no point bothering the locksmith for an old heap like that. I prodded. Was she sure it was empty? The old lady assured me she’d emptied it herself a dozen years ago of nonsense it held, for her first tenant, the trust-fund socialist. Then the key had been lost. Neither the socialist nor the professors that followed had ever expressed any desire to use it. It was probably full of spiderwebs now. Maybe I’d have time to take care of them? I protested that there wasn’t any hurry, the closets in my room were enough for the few bags I had. The hand of whist went on. I lost with a smile and took my leave at an early hour. The old lady tried to hold me back. I pleaded work, and promised to return soon, since she’d asked. The glass of bubbly and the two fingers of cassis I’d had were making my head spin, and my state of nervous excitement only helped that along. I went straight back to my office and fell asleep, head in my hands, among the manuscripts. When I awoke, my decision had been made.

***

I’ve taken care, with fame, to keep my private life sheltered from the public’s absurd curiosity. The lowest insults are but childish taunts beside the radical shamelessness of art.

But still, how they’d laugh if they knew I’ve lived like a doll in a plush box while writing a body of work often seen as shocking. I was alone in all the world. The old lady and her friends had become a sort of family to me. An honorary family, an unserious family. By staving off my loneliness, the company of these old, seemingly disused folks, simple benevolent presences, proved a great consolation. They are dead, alas! Died off one by one. The old lady, whom I’d been paying a life annuity for years now, was the last to go, at the start of winter. That, too, is a sign.

Day after day, for ten years, I have transcribed in my own hand the body of work from the perfect calligraphy in the pages of the ledgers. Ten years is quite short for twenty one volumes, but for those then years, I worked ten to sixteen hour days.

I never made do with just copying. Each morning at dawn, I’d open the work underway to where I’d left off late the night before. I’d re-read a few lines before covering up the page, and do my best to guess, to make up the lines that followed. I’d write them down on a sheet of paper. I’d uncover the corresponding passage in the ledger, compare the two texts, doublecheck. I can say that in ten years and some six or seven thousand handwritten pages, I was wrong ninety seven times. These last few years I was so sure of myself I could have dispensed with doublechecking. But I always worked honestly. I always doublechecked. And I always published the text with the mistakes in it. To be found among my papers is the catalogue raisonné of my ninety-seven variations. They will be deemed insignificant, and with reason.

Today, I am done. The final proofs of the final volume arrived the day before yesterday. Here they are, corrected; they will soon be sent back to my publishers. Everything is written, everything published, except these pages. They alone do not belong to the oeuvre in the armoire. They are at once my confession, my memoirs, and my literary legacy.

Don’t go looking for the ledgers. I have burned them. Day is breaking now. In a few minutes, the first rays of the sun will enter my office and illuminate the empty shelves of the armoire. I have nothing more to say, nothing more to do. Perhaps I will not even need to put an end to my days.

Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud has been honored over a career of more than 40 years with the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire at Utopiales. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Subtropics, The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, Joyland, Confrontation, The Brooklyn Rail, and most recently in the anthologies Exotic Gothic 5 (PS Publishing, 2013) and XO Orpheus (Penguin, 2013) edited by Kate Bernheimer.

Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from PEN America, the NEA, the Fulbright program, the Lannan Foundation, and the French Embassy. His work has won the John Dryden Translation prize and been nominated for the French-American Foundation and Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prizes. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, World Literature Today, and Weird Fiction Review. The translator of almost 200 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.