The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil

Author:Karine Tuil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press

7

Samuel’s downfall has been violent and painful, but there is also something—he is able to see this himself—almost funny about it. Tragicomic, that’s it. So here he is, waiting for something to happen, for a solution to magically appear—or perhaps simply waiting to be put out of his misery. He dreamed about it the night that those guys threatened him, in fact. He might die . . . well, so what? He’s alone now. Let them kill him. Let them finish him off. He’s losing everything anyway. Look at him—gap-toothed before his time. What does it matter if they smash all the rest of his teeth, his ribs too—why not, just for the fun of it?—his bones are fragile, it’d be easy. He can no longer feel his body. Everything is numb except his hand and his head—the only things that let him know the difference between nothingness and suffering, absence and solitude. He’s all out of drugs, his bank account is in the red, and his laptop is gone. He has no choice: he calls Nina and begs her to send him cash—a money order, a bank transfer—because he’s dying here. He won’t call her again, he promises, swears, and she ends up agreeing: the price of her mental and moral tranquility. It’s humiliating—the fact of being paid by her, the fact of having called her simply to obtain money—but it’s nothing compared to the desperation/fear/tension he feels, nothing compared to the certainty he has lost. The only certainty now is that he is damned, that he won’t last long. And yet he doesn’t give in: he clings to life, to what he might still make of it. And the next day, he makes the payment—hands over the cash and is given his laptop. Everything’s fine—no threats, no violence. They’re quits. But he’d better not come back expecting a fix from them, because they won’t give him anything. The drugs will go to those who stick to the only system that still works: consume/pay, consume/pay. He’ll die alone, as he no longer has the means to be an active participant in this system. He’ll have to make do with alcohol.

So now he spends his days drinking, reading, and taking notes, as if what he were writing is a manual on romantic despair and solitude, and all the time he thinks: I’m not alone. Other writers have lived, loved, suffered, and have been able to turn their ordeal into literature. He has never been as disciplined as he is now, working for hours on his novel, waking up in the middle of the night to write passages of shocking violence in a sort of trance, as if they were being dictated to him by some kind of inherent rage, as if he were intoxicated and asphyxiated by anguish and anger even while he was in his mother’s womb. But in fact, the rage is just him. He is this writer with the wounded language, the chaotic sentences, the words pouring

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