Who You Think I Am by Camille Laurens

Author:Camille Laurens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2017-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

And so, putting her faith in the power of love, Armide throws herself at Renaud’s feet, confesses to the spells she has cast on him, and swears she will abandon them. “I love you,” she tells him. “I betrayed you, I lied to you. But the only truth is that I love you. Keep me with you. For your love, I will undertake anything, I will even convert to your religion if you ask it of me.” Renaud hesitates, gazes lovingly and sadly at the enchantress’s beautiful face, but is pained by such betrayal. In the end, the hero’s duty is stronger than all other emotion. He tears himself away from Armide’s sweet supplications and leaves her forever.

I told this story to my students and couldn’t get it out of my mind, I was obsessed with it. One question went around and around inside my head: if I admitted to my previous imposture, would Chris still love me? Would he be shocked to have been manipulated like that? Enough to leave me?

In fact, if I’m to be completely honest, that wasn’t really the question that haunted me. The real one, the only erosive question I had, was this: Was Chris still thinking about Claire Antunes? Whenever he looked thoughtful or seemed distant, less attentive, the idea tormented me. Did he still love her? Did he love her more than me, with a purer love, like Renaud’s for his sacred mission? With an unconditional love? Wasn’t I just a fallback, a consolation for losing her? My jealousy was corrosive.

In order to escape this overriding fear, I decided to put our love to the test. But I had many more doubts than Armide, even if nothing about Chris’s behavior justified them for any length of time: he showed every sign of tenderness and desire. I had no objective reason to test the strength of our connection. I don’t know why I did it. But I did it. I brought Claire Antunes back to life.

I made careful preparations, and could think of nothing else; I wanted to ratify our love. First I took out the phone that I’d hidden in a shoebox at the bottom of my closet. I hadn’t terminated the two-euro contract, I’d forgotten to. I charged up the battery and listened, quivering, to the last message Chris had left me months earlier. His sad voice made my heart constrict, but with jealousy—a towering, destructive, deranged jealousy. His past annihilated my present life. So I fine-tuned my strategy. I was well aware that I should abandon the idea, shouldn’t be playing with fire, but I couldn’t back down now, my fear had completely taken over.

The idea was that Claire Antunes would reappear in the form of a lover’s ultimatum: having been unable to forget Chris for all these months of silence and distance, she had broken up with her fiancé and now wanted to meet him at last, meet Chris and live with him, because she loved him, she was no longer in any doubt of that.

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