1628726814 (N) by Pierre Lassus

Author:Pierre Lassus
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2017-06-25T21:00:00+00:00

IN SUM, HIS LIFE seemed like a nightmare to him. “My life is in chaos, and there’s hardly anything I can do about it…. A telephone call, a forgotten appointment, a check I must cash if I want any money, and all my plans change…. I am in such despair over missed trains, missed appointments, lost addresses, bills, forgotten phone calls, reproaches, difficult reconciliations, wounded friends, headaches when I have to speak, a blank mind when I have to write, three dinner invitations accepted for the same evening…. I’ve been living in two rooms along with the movers, my wife, and her friends, my secretary typing away in a corner, a cook who has gone mad and makes scenes, telephones and visitors interrupted by events outside. I receive [visitors] as though in the lobby of a train station.”10

He thought he’d hit bottom in April 1942 when, having gone to Montreal for two days to give a lecture, he found himself stuck in Canada because his exit visa from the United States hadn’t been validated. He was told it might take six months for the problem to be resolved. He called on all his connections to try to extricate himself from the situation, inundating them with letters and telephone calls, either desperate or angry: he was convinced he was the victim of a Gaullist plot. He managed to exhaust the patience of Elizabeth Reynal, the wife of his editor, by begging her nonstop to intervene with the State Department. He stayed in his hotel room, brooding over his bad luck and cursing the Gaullists and the American government. He somatized his unhappiness: he was unable to sleep and spent two weeks lying on his bed with a bag of ice on his stomach to numb pain that was probably due to an inflamed gallbladder. During this time, Consuelo, who had refused to go to Montreal with him, hired a private detective, convinced he was with another woman. She finally joined him, but that didn’t exactly improve the situation. In the end, the two days turned into five weeks, and he lived this misadventure as though it were torture, which only worsened his paranoia that he was abandoned, alone, and surrounded by plotters conspiring against him.

He felt old and actually was in poor condition, thanks in part to his old wounds but also to a lifestyle his doctors wouldn’t have recommended. He spent his nights writing and waking up his entourage to read them what he had written; he drank a lot, smoked endlessly, got no physical exercise, and took no care in what or when he ate. “I’m forty-two years old. I’ve been in a bunch of accidents. I can’t even jump with a parachute. Two days out of three, my liver gives me trouble…. Ever since a fracture in Guatemala, my ear rings night and day…. I feel so, so weary! In the state that I’m in, I can’t even carry a two-kilogram box, get out of bed, or pick a tissue up from the ground without suffering physically.

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