A Life on Paper: Stories Read online

  Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud

  A Life on Paper: Stories

  For my mother

  Foreword by Brian Evenson

  Born in 1947, Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud is the author of nearly two dozen books, and winner of the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt. He has been translated into a dozen languages but never, until now, into English. He has been publishing for more than thirty years: his fourth book, Mathieu Chain, appeared in 1978. In that novel, the author Mathieu Chain hears someone speaking of one of his books, a book that he is certain he never wrote despite it appearing in his bibliography. This small mystery and Chain's attempt to unravel it end up leading the character out of the known world and in entirely unexpected and compelling directions-not dissimilar to the way the simple act of shaving turns the life of the main character upside down in Emmanuel Carrere's novel The Mustache.

  One of the great achievements of such a novel is that it feels at once oddly real and shot through with the fantastic: the twisty little passages of the everyday crosscut the billows and swirls of the imaginary. The real seems always to be threatening to unravel. Such complex interaction doubly characterizes Chateaureynaud's stories, which offer not only a subtle tension between the real and the imaginary, but also a tension between the calm and the severely odd. As Michele Gazier has suggested, "These stories are haunted by the twin graces of simplicity and mystery… beneath their almost too seemly exteriors, they burst with madness, strangeness, a sensuality that their prose veneer conceals only the better to reveal."

  A compilation chosen from several collections of Chateaureynaud's fiction published over a period of thirty years, A Life on Paper provides an excellent and representative sampling of Chateaureynaud's work. Some stories shade far into the fantastic; others seem realistic except for one brief moment or lingering doubt. But in all of the stories gathered here, we have the impression of a focused writer pursuing a personal and highly individual oneiric project. Like Kafka, Chateaureynaud has little interest in explaining away the fantastic or in dulling its claws: the dreamy strangenesses to be found in his stories simply exist and must be taken at face value. At one moment a frustrated poet might suddenly stumble into an impossible museum dedicated to him and documenting his life in painful detail. In another, a taxi driver might reach a street that connects the real world to a void. In other stories, unexplained blight mars both buildings and men, a man suddenly develops ridiculously small wings, an obsessive father has more than 93,000 photographs taken of his daughter, and a dead man has the bad manners to continue interacting with the living. A man might strip naked and then set fire to his house, his clothing, and his birds, and then wander off to nowhere. But, on the other hand, Chateaureynaud might catch you off-guard by offering a seemingly non-fantastical sketch of the life of a schoolboy. This is a world with severed heads still living in sacks, automated firing squads, time travel, tattoos that seem to have lives of their own, and a stuffed woman who occupies a musical instrument case. There are mythical creatures, like undines and sirens. There are dark, perhaps demonic pacts that seem to have been struck over (believe it or not) antique furniture. Through it all we find writers, discussions of writing and art, that allow us to read these stories metafictionally, and glimpse the phantom of the writer as he composes them. In addition, many of the elements of the gothic surface, but Chateaureynaud's tone that is anything but gothic. At times there are moments that strike us as familiar-the tale of a cursed knight, a city that might be out of Calvino, flickers of Vonnegut or even Barthelme, an island that seems half-built from The Tempest and half from Alfredo Bioy-Casares's The Invention of Morel-but Chateaureynaud always inflects these moments just slightly, keeping the reader both interested and off-balance.

  Chateaureynaud's most sinuous and elegant stories are reminiscent of Isak Dinesen's and their pleasure comes at least as much from the care with which the stories are told and their tone as from the content of the stories themselves. "Each of these texts," suggests Isabelle Roche, "is an embodiment of the short story in its purest form." The longer stories in particular are told with an authority and composure that do not resort to cheap tricks but offer instead moments of genuine subtlety and surprise.

  Edward Gauvin's precise and fluid translation does Chateaureynaud great justice. Both in the original French and in Gauvin's English rendering, the prose is scrupulous and deliberately out of step with the post-Beckettian trends of much of contemporary French fiction. But while these stories feel out of time, they never feel old or unoriginal. Quite the opposite: as each story develops one quickly finds oneself engrossed in a fantastical narrative that only Chateaureynaud could write. These are sharp, carefully chiseled stories that initially seem deceptively simple but soon reveal hidden facets and satisfying complexities.

  Taking all that into account it is surprising that it took thirty years to bring Chateaureynaud into English. He is an original, and though his vision is highly personal, it is also highly contagious. Before you're done reading, you'll begin to feel highly attuned to the way the real seeps into the surreal, the way the everyday, given just the right push, can collapse into the extraordinary.

  Brian Evenson Providence, March 2010

  A Citizen Speaks

  s for the blight, we call it rust for its color. In reality, whether mold or oxide, its true nature eludes us. Does it not assail stone.and slag alike? Both zinc and bronze? Even woodwork corrodes here. The leprosy spares only living things: a tree will spend ten years unscathed, slowly rising over a path, but let a branch be cut, treated, painted, and varnished-that branch will be disease-ridden in a few months. So unerring is it that old men's complexions often imitate its taint. That was how my father died: reddish, as though life had singed him. In his final days, I sometimes pressed on, in my walks, all the way to the park's far end, where we'd never before ventured. An ancient statue with a finger to its lips-a faun or genius loci-imposed silence on the crabgrass sprouting there. And this corner of nature seemed to obey. By some singular disposition of the place, the wind that blew all over the hill didn't blow there, and I never saw a bird land in that spot. Only my steps, crushing the grass beneath them, disturbed the silence. I drew closer to the faun. Perhaps his nudity explained why we'd been forbidden to play there. On his cheeks, chest, and thighs blossomed brown spatters of blight; hardly the least curious feature of this kind of decay is that it begins from within, making its way from the heart of a thing to its surface. One day, standing before the faun-my father was then at death's door, and I'd come one last time seeking the seclusion I was sure to find there-I had the idiotic but irrepressible urge to stab him with a long stick lying at his feet. My makeshift lance struck him right in the middle of one of the biggest russet spatters, roughly covering his heart had he been a creature of flesh. The rotten marble opened to the pointed stick as would a human breast, and I let go in fright. The lance quivered for a moment at the heart of the statue before falling to the ground. From the wound, with a stirring as of dust, red shavings drained away, a coarse powder of mingled rust and marble that I momentarily mistook for blood. I could not have been more terrified had the faun brought his hands to his chest. Yet still he stared at me with those same mocking eyes, a finger on his lips, as though asking me not to tell anyone about the marvel. My heart beating, I examined his wound more closely and saw that there was nothing left to him but a marble husk, the inside of the statue no longer solid but filled with that strange aggregate so like sand in an arena where blood from carnage had long since dried in the sun. Another shudder passed through me at the thought that my father was the same way, and I imagined his insides, his fragile flesh and organs scraping beneath his skin's reddish tra
nslucency. I went home. I was informed of his sudden death. But I was speaking of the city; if only rarely is it so severe, the damage caused by the rust nonetheless leaves unusual and vaguely catastrophic traces on everything within our walls. We who live here can on first glance pick out from among a hundred pictures of unnamed streets the only one from our town. This is because the secret germinations of our facades and rooftops always show through in some sign only we detect. Well before the spatters I've mentioned blossom in broad daylight, wood and stone tarnish, darken imperceptibly. It's as though the sun suddenly loathed bathing this sickly matter in its light. Although many buildings seem new thanks to coats of paint, no doubt remains that the entire city is wasted by this disease, as though by an acid it secretes itself, which will one distant day restore this spot to its initial desolation.

  Paris, April 1974

  A Life on Paper

  he Siegling-Brunet collection no doubt constitutes the most extensive gathering of photographs devoted to a single person. Kathrin Laetitia Siegling was born in London on January 12, 1939. On April 14, 1960, she died in Amiens, where she had moved with her husband Francois Brunet. She lived, then, some 7,750 days, during which, at the rate of some dozen shots every twenty-four hours, her picture was taken 93,284 times. To the best of my knowledge, the negatives were never preserved, but the 93,284 prints were. Meticulously numbered and filed, they fill five large metal trunks I acquired in 1974, at the public auction of the Brunet estate. Need I add that, at the time, I made off with the lot for a song? Neither principal ballerina nor movie star nor Olympic champion of any kind, nor even muse, to a famous man, Kathrin Siegling never in her life enjoyed any celebrity likely to confer upon her image any market value. Victims of a lack of imagination too common to waste time maligning, Brunet's heirs all but gave away the chests that contained, in its entirety, an iconography unique in all the world: the life of a woman captured and made fast hour after hour, from birth to death.

  It seems an opportune time to provide a summary biography and sketch a portrait of the strange, tormented man that Anthony Mortimer Siegling, Kathrin's father, was in the last part of his life.

  The fifth child of a Cheshire baronet, he was born in 1890 and fought on the front at Artois during the First World War. The eve of the Second found him successfully practicing business law in London. After a brief engagement, he married Louise Mary Atkinson. He was forty-eight years old. Louise Mary, thirty years his junior, died of puerperal fever shortly after giving birth to Kathrin.The cruel brevity of his happiness late in life explains for me what must be dubbed Anthony Siegling's "madness." Fiance, husband, father, and widower in the space of little over a year, he never recovered from his wife's death. He could well have conceived a morbid rancor toward the child, as has been known to happen. He did nothing of the sort. Au contraire, he devoted toward her an affection legitimate in principle, but excessive in its manifestations-in one of them, at least.

  The disappearance of someone dear to us leaves an emptiness to be filled in one way or another. Psychologists call this slow healing "grief work," and we know what risks we run when it is not carried out: asthenia, heightened vulnerability, wasting away… Lost in suffering, Anthony Siegling got it in his head to recover Louise Mary, to resurrect her in Kathrin's barely formed person. Better yet, he would by means of the young girl take possession of all that had escaped him in her mother's life. He would spy upon her, keeping successive images of her childhood and adolescence, opposing their erosion by time's acid tides as no one before him had ever done.

  His affluence facilitated the realization of what would have been, for a poorer man, a dream with no tomorrow. As his professional obligations prevented him from pursuing his project with the required diligence, he took on a photographer-in-residence to whom he gave the task of taking snapshots of Kathrin at regular intervals from morning till night. He himself had long practiced photography as a hobby. Every night, upon returning from the city, he proceeded to develop and print the day's harvest of pictures.

  We must imagine what these twenty years of unyielding routine were for him and her. For twenty years, Anthony Siegling never went to bed without first passing through that doorway, bathed in red light, to his darkroom; without having selected, enlarged, developed and fixed, dried and glazed a dozen portraits of his daughter. What could his thoughts, his state of mind have been-his exaltation and, almost certainly, his occasional exhaustion? With his infinite patience, night after night, image after image, was he able, in discerning an almost imperceptible change in Kathrin's features, to surprise time at work? For truly, the mystery of time itself is caught in the continuity of the Siegling-Brunet collection. Kathrin's appearance remains unchanged from photo to photo, and yet the first show us a newborn, and the last a woman dead at twenty… But the father's passion, in every sense of the word, cannot make us forget the daughter's. According to my investigation, seven photographers succeeded one another at her side. I located and interviewed several of them. The most intelligent and sensitive of them, John Cory, told me in no uncertain terms that he considered Anthony Siegling criminally insane, that the man had made of Kathrin's life a road to Calvary. She was thirteen when he took up his post at the Siegling household. He lasted only a few months, so great was his dislike for the job. I can still remember the very words he used to describe him. "Monsieur," he told me, "that was not photography. It was espionage, persecution, mental cruelty! The poor child seemed to me a hunted animal… There was something about her of a doe who forever hears the twig snapping beneath the wolf's paw. A sweet child, yes, but pale, pale, with a drawn look, a flicker of anguish in her eye… And so many nervous tics! She blinked all the time. See here, it wasn't humane to put a little girl through all that. I chose to walk out on the whole mess. I told her father why. He wouldn't listen. He threw my last check in my face. We almost came to blows. Bah! He was insane, that's all there was to it!"

  Kathrin died after falling down a flight of stairs at her in-laws' house in Amiens, in the spring of 1960. She had just married Francois Brunet. She had met him during a ceremony commemorating Haig's Army and the combat her father had seen. Francois Brunet was a press photographer. The day they met, he was covering the event for a major regional paper.

  As for me, despite all the rejections I've come up against so far, I have not despaired of someday convincing a patron to finance the museum of my dreams, where the collection chance has entrusted to me will finally be exhibited in its entirety. For I cannot help but believe the destiny of Kathrin Siegling-Brunet and the 93,284 photos that recreate her now belong to the artistic heritage of humanity.

  Lozere, March 1989

  Come Out, Come Out

  ith the help of his cane, the old man went to see if the gardener had indeed opened the valve to drain the pool. On his way back, he passed under the arbor. On the rattan table were cards someone had forgotten to put away after the last hand of liar's poker. He gathered them, replaced them in their case, and crossed the grounds, grumbling.

  The sky was still blue, but he felt the autumn coming in his bones. A sudden disgust of winter and cold had overtaken him early, toward his fortieth year and, bit by bit, extended to autumn and its rains. He abhorred the dulled thud of chestnuts falling on the wet lawn, and of his own steps on the matted leaves.

  Now he loved only the year's lambent half, spring and summer, which seemed to him shorter every time. Had he been fabulously wellto-do, he would have followed them, in a plane, around the world. Alas, he was but well-off. He lived in a large house, much too far north, that it would have cost him to leave in pursuit of the sun.

  Half the year, he left the house as little as possible. Morose, he stewed away by the fire. Books tumbled from his hands. If he rose from his chair, it was to pace in circles and chide his housekeeper who, from the vagaries of his mood, surmised the news he had received that morning. If he was humming to himself, or petting his dog more tenderly than usual, it was a safe bet Francis and Lydia had pass
ed up two weeks at the shore to humor him. If he turned his nose up at filets of sole for lunch and shut himself away for three days straight in his study, it meant that Zoe had chosen riding lessons instead.

  Very early on in the winter, often as early as Christmas, he readied for summer. He wished his favorite season, and his house-too large now that his daughters lived far away-to be full of children. He checked names off his lists as he received replies to his imploring letters. He would stoop to anything to persuade his grandchildren to spend the summer with him. He had bought a pony, had a pool dug, and filled the basement with scooters and tricycles, balls of all sorts, BB guns, Indian costumes, croquet, bocce and ninepin sets… Anxious to have his heart's fill of the brats, he also invited his nephews, the children's friends, their friends' cousins. He hired a pretty student to watch over the swarm, with whom he didn't really mingle.

  His own happiness lay in spying on the children's. In truth, he left the house barely more often in summer than winter. From his study-his favorite observation post-he followed the frolics of his guests with the help of binoculars. Or slipped down secret paths to the hedge from which he witnessed games of hide-and-seek or tag. When he had been sated by bursts of laughter, sharp cries, and breathless whispers, he returned to his lair, opened a great register, the record of his summers as a tender voyeur, and wrote down, on that day's page: Little Roland had so much fun this afternoon. He was so excited he scratched his arm on the reed grille of the kitchen garden by accident.

  Or perhaps: They've lain waste to my cherry tree like a cloud of blackbirds!

  Or even: A big game of hide-and-seek today. Benoit-I was just as awkward at his age-let himself be tricked at every turn, while Lydia displayed her diabolical imagination. Wasn't it her idea to turn over the gardener's wheelbarrow and hide under it like a turtle in its shell? At the cry of "Come out, come out, wherever you are," she reappeared, her hair and back covered with twigs and dirt, a bit sti, but triumphant.