RECTO
May 1968
At this stage of the night, I’m not sleeping. I’m thirsty, I get up to drink some water. The house is quiet, like the countryside all around, just the subtle rustling of the wind in the big prunus trees in the yard. It’s May and several windows are open to the night, letting in the scent of cut hay. You can hear crickets, the usual symphony of approaching summer. I’m in the kitchen now and I hear the television, a dull murmur that cuts through the usual silence. There are strange noises, distant shouts, like startled birds. A commentator, in a hurried voice, says it’s a “real revolution.” I don’t know if it’s a film or the news. These urban images are so far from the farm and the cows. I approach the room’s entrance, the floorboards creak a little under my bare feet. I see my father stretched out on the living room sofa, a hand on his forehead. My mother is sitting in an armchair, her sewing lamp casting a yellow halo on her fingers as they go back and forth over a piece of fabric. “What are you doing up at this hour ?” she asks, without looking up from her work. “I’m thirsty and I can’t sleep,” I reply. I glance at the screen. I see a city, I think it’s Paris, a strange night there. I see policemen, they’re wearing helmets and carrying weapons that gleam under the streetlights. There are piles of cobblestones at the side of a boulevard, like piles of rocks Papa picks up in the fields. The camera moves, adding to the sense of disorder, everything is blurry and fast. “You need to go back to bed now,” my father says, his voice a little tense. He looks worried ; I haven’t seen him like that since Grandpa had the flu. His parents, who are also my grandparents, live in Paris. I ask if it’s a film or if it’s real, I want it to be a film. Mama wants to reassure me : “It’s a film, darling, don’t worry.” Her thread got tangled. I go back towards the kitchen, a small cool breeze enters the room. It comes from the hills whose silhouettes you can just make out in the distance despite the darkness, soft, sleeping shapes. I wonder if the noises from Paris reach here, carried by this wind.
October 1973
At this stage of the night, I open my eyes and see the harsh light of a streetlamp penetrating through the curtain’s gap, illuminating the wall. Someone, before us, drew a cruel woman in India ink on it, with black hair and pointed teeth. I think her name is Vampirella, a comic book heroine my brother read. We’ve only lived in this house for a short while, here in the Parisian suburbs, a housing development house with a tiny, ridiculous garden. I finally have my own room. My brother has the one on the same landing, upstairs. We have the whole floor to ourselves, even if the stairs creak with every step. My father’s business is doing well, at least, it was doing well until these last few days. He works for a firm that sells bituminous or asphalt roofing. But the 1973 oil crisis is shaking us all at different levels. The adults talk about “crisis,” about “shortage,” words that sound dry and cold. My father has to go sign on at the unemployment office, that’s what he said, his voice is deeper. He doesn’t have a diploma, he often repeats that. He has to meet psychologists to take tests, people who ask strange questions, he doesn’t like that at all. His silhouette is less straight in the evening when he comes home. My mother abandoned her sewing business ; her machines stayed in the countryside when we came to settle here. She started painting a year or two ago, melancholic colors, landscapes that don’t resemble the ones here. In front of our house flows the Oise, which is a rather dirty river ; I’ve seen things floating in it. On its banks, there’s a lot of trash, crumpled papers, old bottles, and mixed with oil slicks that shimmer in rainbows when the sun hits them. Barges pass in front of our windows, heavy and slow ; it’s a ceaseless spectacle ; it makes the windowpanes vibrate. Nothing here pleases me. I miss my old life, the endless fields, the profound silence of the night, the smell of earth after rain. Here, even the crickets sound wrong.
November 1989
At this stage of the night, P. is sleeping. Her breathing is regular, a slight breath against my shoulder. I’ve taken refuge in the alcove, curled up, listening to the news. The radio, an old Philips set on the wobbly stool, broadcasts hour by hour what’s happening in Germany, an uninterrupted flow of excited voices and breathless reports. And now, it’s happening : the journalist’s voice trembles, you can almost hear him crying. East Berliners have just forced their way through different checkpoints of the Wall, alerted by West German media that permissions for passage from the GDR to the FRG, doled out sparingly for decades, have been lifted. The destruction of the Wall begins this very night. It’s unbelievable. It’s an event I never thought I’d live to see. I wonder if I should wake P. to tell her, to share this moment that marks the end of an era, of a world. At the same time, witnessing this historic event here, in this Bastille apartment where our silences have grown so heavy, shortly before our definitive breakup, awakens in me a selfish desire to keep it to myself until morning. To savor it alone, this secret of a world tilting. Not to break the silence before the end, before the tilt of our own wall. The voices on the radio are those of regained freedom, but in the room, I hear only the beating of my own heart and P.’s breath, still unaware that the world has changed.
July 1994
At this stage of the night, I open my eyes and hear the rain. It’s pouring, a resonant sheet of sound enveloping the old house in Montfort l’Amaury. Raindrops, fine and cold, penetrate the kitchen through the ill-fitting window, and the cat, crouched on the sill, meows, a plaintive, sharp sound. I look at the alarm clock, its green digits in the dark : it’s 4 in the morning. Too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep. I make myself a coffee, the bitter smell fills the room. I turn on the computer I just bought secondhand when I moved into this old house. It’s a strange light-grey piece of furniture, with a screen that takes time to light up. The modem is sluggish, its plaintive fax-like hiss distorts the air, but after a while, after crackling and beeping, the connection is made. I go to AOL, this window onto the world that opens, line by line. In bold headlines, I read the words, black and heavy : genocide, Tutsi, Noroît, Rwandan Patriotic Front. Hard to wake up to that. It’s as if the coffee is turning to ice in my cup. I check my messages, looking for a distraction, a breath of air. The cat comes to join me, climbing onto my lap, her soft claws in my pajama pants. We look at the screen for a good while longer, the scrolling letters, the headlines of newspapers talking about a distant, broken world. Then I put her down and go look out the bedroom window. The rain has stopped, silence has returned, almost deafening. I open the window. A rooster crows in the distance, its hoarse voice tears through the dawn. A motorcycle sputters in an adjacent street, the sound bounces off the walls of the sleeping houses. First bird songs, timid at first, then more confident. The cat clacks her teeth ; she might see a sparrow on the branch. It will soon be 7 AM, time to go to work. This world waking up around me knows nothing of what the screen told me tonight.
September 2001
At this stage of the night, the images replay in a loop. They spin and spin in my head, like a scratched record. At first, when I saw them for the first time, I thought it was a film, one of those American blockbusters. I was coming back from my job in Lausanne, I’d driven on the highway to Yverdon-les-Bains. At the town entrance, I’d been pulled over because I hadn’t yet changed my French license plates, an administrative formality that seemed huge at the time. M.A. was in front of the television, sitting on the sofa, she had a strange look on her face, pale, with wide eyes. “Look,” she said, in a barely audible voice, showing me the images on television. I didn’t understand immediately. We saw an airliner approaching very tall towers, certainly in the United States, no doubt Manhattan. It was seeing M.A.’s face that I knew it wasn’t a film, not fiction. The plane entered the first tower, slowly, as if time had stretched out. There was no sound, I remember that, a deafening silence that made the scene even more unreal. Then, another plane appeared, very shortly after, to penetrate the second tower. And there, we saw the two towers collapse, majestically, as if they were just a flimsy house of cards that had been flicked over. It was so unreal, so absurd. I didn’t immediately grasp the scale of what I was seeing. It’s now, as I think back on it, eyes wide open in the silent night, that everything makes sense. Abnormal things are happening, that’s for sure. Completely out of sync with our quiet life here in Europe, in Switzerland, that’s what I tell myself. The world is changing. It’s even possible that this event marks a total change of era or epoch, a fracture in time. As I couldn’t sleep anymore, tormented by these images, I got up and went to the living room. The event had happened the day before, and since then, all the television channels worldwide had been replaying the images in a loop, tirelessly, as if to forever engrave the catastrophe in our memories.
Summer 2003
At this stage of the night, I brood over my life. I have the impression that time is slipping away, that every second is a drop of water escaping, and that I can’t hold onto anything. I’ve just arrived from Switzerland, a step backward, a kind of defeat. Back in Lyon, Rue Henri Pensier, a 50 sq. m. apartment, 700 euros a month, a rent that seems exorbitant for the space. My job is a 5-minute walk away ; I manage a network of international investigators for the Americans in Sans-souci. It’s not without worry, quite the opposite. The proof is, I can no longer sleep. The heat doesn’t help ; the heatwave has been going on for several days already, a blanket of lead over the city ; even at night the air is heavy and still. I spend a lot of time on the internet, my refuge. I chat with women on a messaging service, Caramail, a name that sounds soft for such a harsh world. I divorced a few months ago, a page turned, but which one ? I’m forty-three years old, I own nothing, I haven’t really done anything with my life. That’s my obsession. A recurring adolescent crisis, an endless loop. I feel like talking to women will elucidate something I haven’t understood, a key, an explanation. Talking to men, not for me. Besides, I’m bad at sports, and something unnameable prevents me. Let’s call it the discomfort I feel listening to unspoken words, egos, competitions. Women are more interesting, more direct. They don’t hesitate to talk about intimate things, to reveal fragments of themselves. Sometimes, I feel like a kind of vampire. I don’t drink blood. I drink the words these women are willing to share with me, their stories, their sorrows, their joys. With the internet, it’s very easy ; anonymity, we still believe in it. So you can easily talk to American, Canadian, Scandinavian women ; it’s actually a kind of sociological experiment bordering on mystical experience. What one could conclude as a man is that women generally have much more guts than us. I got up to wet a sheet in the kitchen sink, the cool water on my burning hands. Then I hung it in the window frame, a flimsy rampart against the heat. I turned on the fan hoping to cool the room, a constant hum stirring the hot air. Then I headed to the desk, the dark screen waiting. I pressed enter to wake it from sleep and joined the live chat. That’s where I met S., who wasn’t sleeping either at this stage of the night.
Autumn 2008
At this stage of the night, I can’t sleep. Sleep won’t come ; thoughts spin like wind turbine blades. So as not to disturb S., her calm breathing beside me, I’ve set up a corner in the attic, among the boxes and old furniture. We moved from Lyon to Oullins a few months ago. Rents in the city had become too expensive, I think, or rather we told ourselves that for the same price, we could swap our duplex for a house with a small garden, a space to breathe a little. I had bought a new computer for the occasion, and we had fiber optic internet. The download speed was prodigious ; entire films passed in a blink of an eye ; it was modernity entering our home. It was around that time that I resigned from my job as operations director at that IT consulting firm in Bron. I was fed up, felt like I was treading water. I found another job almost immediately, near Neuville-sur-Saône, a warehouse worker in a depot. I wasn’t earning much, but it was fine. We managed to get by, to make ends meet without too much difficulty. The company I worked for did destocking, buying unsold goods. It was doing incredibly well because people were starting to feel the backlash of the crash, the subprime crisis. People were buying more and more second-hand items. Faucets, electronic wiring, all sorts of goods that my young boss negotiated with large retailers who could no longer afford to keep too much inventory. It was the flip side of the crisis, a kind of parallel economy that was growing. From time to time, I’d take a trip to Paris to see my father. I’d bought a used Mégane, not many kilometers, a diesel, which was good too because fuel prices were soaring, another consequence of all this global disorder. It took me between an hour and an hour and a half to get to work each morning and evening, an eternity spent in Lyon’s traffic jams. I’d listen to the radio in traffic, the news programs, the analyses. I think I pretty much grasped the full extent of that crisis at the time, from listening and reading. A gigantic scam organized to bring down European banks, in the end, when you put the puzzle together. People were being evicted from their homes all over the United States ; unbearable reports were on the news. We saw reports about it, entire families on the streets. We focused on a local crisis, so to speak, a crisis affecting individuals. We couldn’t yet imagine the repercussions on the global economy, the tidal wave that would affect everyone. Here, in the silence of the attic, the rustle of the wind in the tiles brings me back to that time when everything seemed to be on the verge of collapse.
March 2020
At this stage of the night, I wonder how we’re going to get through this. Insomnia follows insomnia, one white night after another, staring at the ceiling. There’s the fact that, suddenly, I can no longer receive students ; my music lessons have stopped ; silence has fallen in the room usually full of notes. And then there’s the fact that expenses keep running ; they don’t go into lockdown. The fact that this situation is as extraordinary as it is absurd, a bubble in time. The fact too that we know nothing, in fact, about this disease, nor its cure, an unknown hanging, heavy and invisible. The fact that, since I can no longer sleep, I am like a zombie, my eyes red, my head foggy. The fact that suddenly, reality has dissipated, like a thick fog that never ends. The fact that we are living in a science fiction book, with masks, social distancing, exit permits. The fact that we no longer know where the truth lies when we witness this parade of experts of all kinds, each with their opinion, their figures, their certainties, and their doubts. The fact that this government inspires no confidence ; its messages are murky, contradictory. The fact that, in the background, one senses enormous financial interests, invisible but powerful cogs, particularly for pharmaceutical laboratories. The fact that, suddenly, we have gone from an apparent democracy to a feudal regime, where decisions fall from above, without discussion. The fact that obscurantism now reigns, that you have to choose your side, your belief. The fact that if you are not for the vaccine, you are necessarily against it, and vice versa ; there are no more nuances, no more grey. The fact that the binary nature of opinions and judgments, accelerated by the use of social networks, doesn’t help anything ; it digs ditches. The fact that I would really like to sleep, and I can’t, that this night is mine, and the whole world’s.
July 2025
At this stage of the night, I pinched myself to see if I was still alive. Today’s world is no longer the world I once knew ; memories stretch, fade. The heat is suffocating ; even in the middle of the night, it clings to the skin. I sleep in a separate room in the house, so as not to warm S. with my breathing machine. I removed the mask connected to the respiratory machine, a slight feeling of coolness on my face. I took the opportunity to get up and go down to the kitchen, my feet on the cold tiles, to make myself a coffee. The cat is there, behind the kitchen door, a black shadow. She meows when she sees me, her familiar whine. “It’s not time to eat yet,” I tell her, in a hoarse voice. “Go back to sleep.” I went back upstairs to open the computer and landed on this page in VS Code, a redesign of my website’s homepage. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time coding, lines of text piling up, loops, functions. I think I’m managing to batten down the hatches, to retreat into solving pure logical problems. All the more so since absurdity increasingly reigns outside. Just yesterday, it comes back to me, that woman telling me not to listen to everything that’s said about the far right. That the real problem is the immigrants. That as long as we don’t fix that, things won’t get better. She’s Italian, a Calabrian. “I’m also of immigrant stock,” I say, without aggression. “Yes, but it’s not the same thing,” she retorts. “When our parents arrived, they wanted to integrate.” I don’t know, I no longer know. “That kind of talk tires me out,” I say, cutting her short. “Let’s get back to this painting.” Her boat is far too big ; it takes up all the space on the canvas, crushing the landscape. Moreover, it’s right in the center ; you see only it, a dead weight. I take a piece of charcoal and show her on her sketch. “At this stage of the painting, things can still be modified quite easily,” I say. “Leave a little more air around it, and besides, there’s no one in your boat. It’s a ghost ship. A ghost ship sailing on a ghost ocean in a ghost world.” The heat weighs down.
VERSO
At this stage of the night, my wanderings in the city always bring me back, at one point or another, to Rue Saint-André des Arts. Like an invisible magnet. And more specifically to that art-house cinema, whose discreet facade promises distant journeys. That day, it was a Tarkovsky film, perhaps one of his early works. It had rained all day, a fine, persistent rain, and the street’s cobblestones were slippery ; the black asphalt gleamed under the neon lights of the bookstores. I took refuge in that cinema because of the bad weather, I think, but also out of that thirst for elsewhere that only the big screen can offer. The room was almost empty ; an smell of old velvet and cold dust hung in the air. I chose a seat in the third row, just close enough for the image to envelop me without overwhelming me. The screening began, and the darkness swallowed me. It was the first film by this director I had seen, and I particularly remember that scene where a man chops down trees, axe stroke after axe stroke, with an almost superhuman determination. It seems to me it was twilight, that uncertain hour when day mingles with night, a pale light filtering through the forest canopy. He was clearing the way to climb a hill, not towards an earthly peak, but as if to reach a star, a distant ideal. The image is still very strong in my memory, that repeated gesture, the sweat, the cracking wood. And it must also resonate, I think, with my Slavic blood, something ancestral that understands this quest, this strength. The film ended in a heavy silence. I stepped out into the Parisian night, my mind still numb from the images. The rain had stopped, but the streets were still damp, reflecting the yellow halos of the streetlights. The outside world seemed strangely unreal to me after the intensity of the film. I walked without a specific destination, the cobblestones echoing under my steps. The cinema experience had left an imprint, a silent certainty that some paths can only be opened by sheer will, even when the star seems unreachable. Perhaps, as in that film, I was also still driven at that time by a kind of impossible dream, but I no longer remember which one. A hazy, elusive dream that pushed me without me knowing its destination. Afterwards, I made the rounds of the bistros, as I often did at that time. I felt so lonely that it was the only place where I could gorge myself on a little human warmth, blend into the hum of conversations, the smell of stale tobacco and spilled coffee. Each counter was a temporary refuge, a stopover before returning to the silence of my own apartment. Loneliness, at this stage of the night, was a beast that followed me everywhere, and the lights of the cafés were the only ones that could keep it at bay for a moment.
