Written in Invisible Ink by Herve Guibert

Author:Herve Guibert [Guibert, Hervé]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

— 1982

Vertigoes

The doctor examining me gazed at the back of my eye with a thin beam of light, then used many low-weight hammers all over my body to provoke shudders, nervous contractions, he grasped my lower lip and said “You're suffering from vertigo, aren't you?”

1. I spent the night with T. We got up, I'd already taken a shower, and we got dressed, we went down together to have breakfast at Madame Odile's, then we went back up and T. undressed again to take a shower. Suddenly the phone rang for me and I left T. lying on my bed to go answer my mother in the next room, in my office. My mother's voice was pleasant, she had just spent several days with her sister, we talked about the bad weather that was common to the two places we were speaking from. I hang up and I go back to my room, T. isn't there anymore. I go into the bathroom, where the door is shut almost all the way, maybe I'll find T. there. No, he's not there. I go back into the office, he's not there either. I call his name, he doesn't answer. I think he's hiding, and my worry starts to grow as I look behind each door in vain. He can't be on the balcony, he can't have left the apartment. I haven't heard him and his form, however fleeting in my field of view, would have betrayed him if he had wanted to get to the windows. I go from one room to the next and then I think that maybe he's moving around at the same moment I am, contrariwise, behind my back, right under my nose. My tone turns to begging: there's no chance, given our closeness, that he won't notice the intense fear that's overcome me. Because, in positioning myself on the threshold of the two rooms, a leg on each side, and swiveling my head from one side to the other, I see that he can't be following me, or preceding me, because he isn't there. Now I know that he can't be anywhere in the apartment. Within a few seconds, I think I've gone crazy, I'm seized by a horrendous vertigo that feels like my own death: I've never known T., because he's not there, because nothing betrays his presence. The nature of our friendship means he would have shown himself a long while ago, he wouldn't have abandoned me in my terror. He doesn't exist, I made him up. Or maybe it's me who doesn't have any existence in these rooms, who's never lived there. I must have been dead for a long while, I'm a ghost, an out-of-place guest. It's T. who is alive, the tenant of these rooms I loved in dozens of years ago, before my death. My hand is close to a glass door and I think I can reach my wrist through to come back to reality, to make my blood and the clamor of glass come to my aid.

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