The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère

Author:Emmanuel Carrère [Carrère, Emmanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2017-07-05T23:00:00+00:00

THAT THREAT HUNG heavily over the final year. Until then the menace had been a constant but vague presence in his life. Every time he walked by someone, or somebody spoke to him, or the phone rang at home, apprehension tied his stomach in knots: the moment had arrived, and his imposture would be brought to light. The danger could come from anywhere, the tiniest event of daily life might set in motion the doomsday scenario that nothing would stop. But now one version of that scenario had become more likely than the others, and no matter how often he remembered what people tell the seriously ill—that it’s perfectly possible to have cancer and yet die of a bee sting or the flu—it was that one version he could not stop thinking about. The longer it took the blow to fall, the more surely it would come, leaving him no escape. If Corinne had asked for her money one week after entrusting it to him, he would still have been able to return it to her and search for another way (but which one?) to live as if he had an income even though he didn’t. Weeks, months went by; the supposedly invested sum was shrinking. Appalled and bewildered, he didn’t even try to make it last, spending it instead in a giddy frenzy. When she asked him for it, what would he do? A few years earlier, he could have tried to replace it by appealing to his usual donors: his parents, his uncle Claude, his in-laws. But he knew, and with good reason, the state of their finances. He’d taken everything from them and spent it all. He had no one left to turn to.

What, then? Tell Corinne that he’d been attacked, that the suitcase of money had been stolen? Confess the truth to her? Part of the truth—that he was in an inextricable financial bind and had dragged her into it with him? The whole truth—seventeen years of lies? Or just collect what was left and take a plane to the ends of the earth? Never come back, vanish. The scandal would erupt within a few hours, but he wouldn’t be there to watch the collapse of his family and face the accusations in their eyes. Maybe he could pass for dead, make everyone think he’d committed suicide. There would be no body, but if he abandoned the car, with a farewell note, near a mountain chasm … Declared dead, he’d be truly out of reach. The problem was that he would still be alive and that alone, even with money, he wouldn’t know what to do with his life. Shedding the skin of Dr. Romand would mean ending up without any skin, more than naked: flayed.

He had known from the beginning that the logical conclusion to his story was suicide. He had often thought about it without ever finding the courage to go through with it, and in a sense, the certainty that he would do it one day let him off for the time being.

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