You Will Not Have My Hate by Antoine Leiris

Author:Antoine Leiris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-06T08:24:43+00:00

N.

November 19

9:00 p.m.

N. wrote to me tonight. We haven’t talked since I told him about Hélène’s death. He wants to see me. I wait for him at a table on a terrace. Around me, the usual hubbub of a Parisian café on a weeknight. As before. I spot his figure at the corner of the street. He is limping. He has a wound in his buttock, a souvenir of Friday’s horror. I put on a suitable facial expression, then immediately change my mind. I don’t want to play that game.

I take him in my arms. His is the biggest smile I have seen since Friday. A smile that cannot help but say, “I’m alive.” Yes, he is alive. He sits down and, almost immediately, begins to tell me all about it. The start of the concert. The beer at the bar. The crowded mosh pit. And then the gunfire. The noises, the smells, the bodies. He doesn’t spare me a single detail, he can’t stop, he forces me to watch on fast-forward the movie that stole my life from me.

I called him that night, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. Probably while it was happening. Probably after. And when, at last, he picked up, I just wanted him to tell me that she was okay. That everything was okay. That she was with him. That maybe she was wounded, but she would survive. I wanted him to tell me that they’d been able to escape and run through the Parisian night. I imagined I could already hear the nervous laughter of two survivors. I waited for him to wake me from my nightmare.

“I can’t tell you anything.”

A silence as heavy as the words he speaks to me now, at this café. And, with that silence, the horizon of doubt spread all over. The darkest despair and the craziest hope. Hélène, at once dead and alive.

Now I know. So, between two events in the story of which he is the hero, I realize why he didn’t tell me that night that she had died, in his arms. I realize he is not yet the survivor I see. He is still there, trapped in that scene that is still being played. And when he apologizes for not having been able to tell me, I don’t blame him. In his movie, the characters don’t die. But this is not his movie. That night, November 13, is the story of the moon that will never rise again. He doesn’t know it yet.

Minute after minute, I become the story he is telling. I note the setting. Commit it to memory. I know that Melvil will soon ask me how Mama died, I know he will want to know everything. So I stay calm. I listen quietly, a spectator to the tragedy of my life that has already begun, which did not wait for its narrator.

When he has finished, we talk about this and that, trying to pretend that everything has not collapsed. We talk about his wound, about Melvil’s naps, about his shop, which he has reopened.

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