The Emperor, C'est Moi Read online

  On rare occasions, a rather impressive character shows up in my life. He’s tall, very tall for his age. Perhaps even a little too much so: he is already taller than his father, who is himself a good size. This character comes to the house now and then, often wearing the same sailor sweater with blue stripes. While our parents talk, the giant and I play chess. We don’t say much; the colossus doesn’t seem to burden himself with useless words. A rare thing. I enjoy playing with him, we’re well matched. He’s a ferocious adversary. These get-togethers began when we were about eight years old. They’re episodic, and never instigated by us. That will come later. On the day in question, I’m thirteen. He is a year older and a foot taller than I am. His name: Sasha.

  Our parents are discussing whether I should go to the same school as “Sasha the giant.” It’s a smaller school, with a single class in each grade, which reassures me. There’s something else, however: today Sasha the giant hasn’t come to play chess with me. He has another game on offer. Making a movie. A movie in which I would play the hero. There’s a reason for all this. In his French class, they are studying my mother’s book, Le Petit Prince cannibale,6 which had won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens a few years earlier. Instead of writing a classic composition, the scholarly report that’s expected of him, Sasha the giant, a budding film director, wants to make a documentary about the “cannibal Little Prince” in person. Here’s a guy who’s not afraid to get eaten alive. I like him, definitely. Besides, I’m delighted at the idea of showing up at my new school heralded by a film in which I’m the star. Two years earlier, my mother had asked me to write about my childhood. The entire text, “My Brain,” appeared in her book Surtout ne me dessine pas un mouton (Whatever You Do, Don’t Draw Me a Sheep).7 This time I wouldn’t be writing, but talking. Talking to the camera. I would be the actor. A done deal.

  Sasha and I start filming immediately. Lights, camera, action! We’re off and running. I take Sasha on a tour of the places I love. I show him the forest of my childhood. I reveal to him fragments of my inner kingdom. We shoot a sequence in front of the grotto, another in the bamboo grove, inside shots, exterior shots. He asks me questions; I answer. And above all, we laugh a lot. We have to shoot certain sequences at least six times, we’re laughing so hard. We’re having a ball. We’re in stitches. Cracking up. In short, we’re filming.

  After the editing, I discover myself playing my own role on the screen. The movie is called Hugo Talks about Sylvester,8 and it’s a great movie.

  A film is born, a friendship begins. For me, this is a premiere. And making movies with jolly companions will quickly become one of my favorite pastimes. We’ll crank out plenty of flops along the way, but at least we’ll have heaps of fun every time. Today we’ve upped the ante and are filming with bigger cameras with more co-conspirators. Sometimes we even find people crazy enough to pay us. Things are going better and better. Ah, cinéma, cinéma . . . Once you’ve got your hooks in us . . .

  Notes:

  6Le Petit Prince cannibale: A violent, impassioned work about a writer and mother of four whose autistic son, Sylvester, refuses to speak. The little boy’s screams and rages “murder the writer most of all,” devouring her words and sabotaging her desperate need to tell the story of Blanche, a singer struggling against cancer to keep her voice alive. The mother’s fury at being silenced must itself give way before her overwhelming determination to defend and nurture her son, who finally, after years of agonizing effort, begins to speak.

  7Surtout ne me dessine pas un mouton (Whatever You Do, Don’t Draw Me a Sheep): A wry take on the first words of the mysterious “little prince” in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book of the same name. The narrator of this tale, who has always felt lonely and misunderstood, has crashed his plane in the Sahara and is awakened at sunrise “by an odd little voice. It said: ‘If you please—draw me a sheep!’” After trying three times to draw a sheep for the small blond boy, who rejects his pictures, the pilot draws him a box supposedly containing the perfect sheep, and the little prince is content.

  8Sylvester: The name of Françoise Lefèvre’s son in her book Le Petit Prince cannibale: “Sylvester, I don’t know how to talk about you. You’re six years old. You are my son. Your real first name is Jean. Ever since you began awakening from your autism a few weeks ago, emerging from your silence, you’ve been asking that we stop calling you Jean. Why? ‘Jean is dead. He’s buried in the cemetery. He wasn’t very interesting. I want another name.’ Those are your words. I suggest your two middle names, Sylvester and Gabriel. You accept Sylvester.”

  Smooth Outside, Empty Inside or The Loser Who Was Taken for a Big Shot

  Now I’m a lycée student, in tenth grade. I am invisible. Inside, everything is deeply buried. So deeply that I feel empty. No more memories, no more future. They’ve won. Now I’m nothing but an insignificant envelope of no interest. I bother no one and no one bothers me. Others govern my conduct. I no longer have the slightest opinion. Nothing stirs inside of me. I am empty. I follow the herd. I am part of the mass. I have let go of myself. I have given up. I am nothing. I speak when I must and say nothing. No one knows anything about me. They like me a lot like that, so they decide to have me repeat tenth grade, so I can drown myself a little more in their mediocrity.

  My after-school life has never been a great success. When I was very young, my mother had me begin music lessons, which I took until I was fifteen. I started with the violin, then studied the piano, followed by the clarinet, and ended with the double bass. About two years of study with each instrument. I’m grateful to my mother for this musical awakening, even though I never managed to master music. I was probably unwilling to really try.

  A pale morning in the lycée yard. We’re running. Around and around the yard for twenty minutes. I run. Until I’ve finished. Counterclockwise, in a rectangle. I’m many laps behind. I run and I get nowhere. Last week, it was rugby. I brought down a guy twice my weight. Earned looks of respect. When it’s soccer, I pretend to get involved, but it shows. I make my team lose. Through lack of interest. So the next day, I don’t pretend at all anymore. I play it straight: I’m simply not there. I am a shadow, a silhouette, an extra who’ll wind up on the cutting room floor. Besides, the film’s no good and drags on too long.

  Average student, introverted. Participation: zero.

  There is one area where I do participate: the theater club on Wednesday afternoons. Two hours a week. I’d stopped wanting anything; the theater reawakens desire in me. My mother immediately signs me up for acting classes at the Regional Academy of Dramatic Art. I’m too young to be officially enrolled, so I’m accepted as a free auditor. I can’t bear them anymore, these “impossibilities” because of my young age. The theater makes me greedy for the world and other people. Finally, a place where I feel at home. There I find a certain exactingness, coupled with good humor. My kingdom reduced to ashes can thus rebuild itself and dance with the realms of others. I know that this process will take time, and the lycée robs me of the time I need.

  I must escape, and quickly. To hell with the rules! The theater and transgression will be my passport for escape. Given that the idea is not to earn hours of detention, which would steal rehearsal time from me, my transgression will be invisible. I discover alcohol and joints. These substances have a gift for shortening my endless days. They don’t make them more entertaining, however. But I’d rather tell myself that I am responsible for the temporary anesthesia of my mind. As for my powers of attention, all the more diminished and woozy in class, they don’t change a thing since I was never listening anyway. I buy a hunter flask in a gun store to keep myself discreetly drunk all day, in the yard. I start drinking in the morning. Whiskey or vodka. I become an expert in faking signatures. A real forger. These fraudulent excuse notes allow me to escape more often to the theater. The only place where I keep my mind clear.

  At the end of eleventh grade, a year noteworthy o
nly for a few minor larcenies in school and my lovely, risky escapes to the theater, I am summoned with my parents to the principal’s office. She, too, calls me Julien, with her big smiles and her beige suits.They’ve always called me Julien at school. And I have always let it pass. It’s convenient. That way, I’m not there. I have never been with them. I am in the office, sitting between my mother and father. The principal looks at me and smiles.

  I am accused of having set up a complex criminal organization affecting the entire lycée.

  I am accused of having established a drug empire, of being the go-to person for narcotics. All this, naturally, without a shred of proof. Based solely on one anonymous tip. The collaborationist Vichy Republic is still alive and kicking. But I’d already known that for years.

  My parents are stunned. My mother plays the angry, tearful woman; my father, the moralizer. I sit quietly while the principal describes my crimes, exaggerating those I’m supposed to have committed and even inventing others. The portrait she paints of me is worthy of Al Capone. Madame, you do me too much honor. You overestimate me. She tells me that from now on, my fate is no concern of hers. What a coincidence, madame, because you have never been my concern at all. At least we will part in agreement. She accuses me of “cold-blooded delinquency.” It is indeed a question of cold-blooded delinquency: the kind one learns by studying the most cunning among us. The delinquency of those who govern us, judge us, and nourish us on useless psychotropic drugs. It’s the most profitable delinquency and the one that risks the least serious punishments. It’s the delinquency, madame, of all those you serve by applying to us what you call the program. This delinquency, I learned it in your school. Only, you feel that I have put it into practice too soon and too swiftly for your taste. Whatever I may have done, it was with the single aim of leaving you, and via the front door. I have at last achieved that aim. I am kicked out. Life may now reassert itself.

  This Is Where We Met

  I have just traveled across France. I push open the doors of the Théâtre du Jour, in Agen,9 where I was admitted after an interview the week before. Actually, I wasn’t really admitted. I was greeted with open arms. Because I was opening mine. The place is full of people. The walls are plastered with posters bearing witness to the productions, lively activity, and history of this theater. It smells like coffee and croissants. People are hungry here. And we’re going to eat. I’m famished. Ready to devour everything.

  Pierre Debauche (big scarf, white hair and suit), the lord of this manor, stands up to welcome me. I go over to him and am heartily embraced.

  “This afternoon at two, you’ll join me onstage. We’re going to put on a one-act farce,The Marriage Proposal.”

  That’s how my theatrical adventure took off: Anton Chekhov. I begin with The Marriage Proposal. I continue with The Seagull. Meanwhile, I work on a character I dream of playing someday: Platonov, the disillusioned provincial schoolmaster in Chekhov’s play of the same name. We resurrect the barricades of the Paris Commune and Victor Hugo prompts me in his own Marie Tudor. I won’t mention all the others, it would take too long. For the first time, I can breathe. Here I devote myself to my favorite game: inventing languages. With “new forms of art,” as Treplieff says in The Seagull. A role is a language, writing is a language, mise-en-scène is a language. A language of images, sounds, and signs. Learning to read one’s feelings, sensations; learning to play and be played. Agreeing to interact with the Other, to share. The play of words, play of bodies, play of masks. Careful: one mask can conceal another. And that’s what is amusing and strange.

  Note:

  9Agen: The capital of the Lot-et-Garonne department in the region of Aquitaine in southwestern France. The Théâtre Ducourneau is the municipal theater there, a venue for the presentation of plays, musical concerts, festivals, and other events, while the smaller Théâtre du Jour presents a wide range of classic and lesser-known plays. Founded in 1994 by its director, Pierre Debauche, the Théâtre du Jour d’Agen has both a resident theater company and a dramatic arts school, an École supérieure d’art dramatique et de comédie musicale.

  Even Trollops Mend Their Skirts or Lucretia’s Lesson

  Picture an actor and a marionette onstage: the marionette will always capture our attention. If a cat walks across the set, the eyes of the whole world will be riveted on that cat. The actors can just go on home. Why? Because neither the cat nor the marionette needs to act. Actors are fragile. Like all people, they must play a part if they want to exist. They have no other choice. And yet, don’t they dream of attaining that degree of presence, tension, and grace the cat embodies so effortlessly? At the Théâtre du Jour, there was a cat named Lucretia. She had taken up residence in the wings. She often wandered through during the performances.

  This morning, we are sitting on the stage around Pierre Debauche, who is teaching a class. He notices a hole of about eight inches in the curtain. He demands in a rage why, in a troupe of forty actors, no one has simply gotten out a needle and thread to sew it up. The curtain can be seen by absolutely everybody. Perhaps even yesterday’s performance took place with that gaping hole. What an apathetic, miserabilist emblem of this theater! “Even trollops mend their skirts!” he snaps. A cutting remark, but which at least has the merit of rubbing our noses in our negligence. Whether in his speeches or his writings, in his moments of anger or geniality, Pierre Debauche’s way with a well-turned phrase in any and all circumstances has always impressed me, when others might have been put off. And that’s when Lucretia makes her entrance onstage. She positions herself in front of the hole and then, after a brief pause, leaps through it in front of forty witnesses. Discreet laughter ripples through the audience. What an incredible response to the master’s displeasure! A theatrical reaction blending nonchalance and innocent provocation. Bull’s-eye! No actor could have done that. Everyone relaxes and the class goes on. That very afternoon, the curtain is mended.

  The How of the Why

  I’ve noticed time and time again that many actors ask themselves why, but neglect the question of how.

  Why have the protagonists of this play ended up in this situation?

  How have the protagonists of this play ended up in this situation?

  How is concrete; why is evasive, and often goes nowhere. Many questions or situations remain inexplicable when considered from that angle. Addressing the question of how brings concrete elements to the fore. How is based on facts; why, on interpretation. Today we know with ever-increasing precision how the universe was formed. On the other hand, we still don’t know why. I’d be amazed if the answer were ever found.

  The how depends on accuracy. Accuracy is universal. It applies everywhere, as in the measurement of time and distance, geometry, various parameters. Accuracy applies beyond this world as well, all through the cosmos, with the exception of black holes and the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

  The why focuses on truth. What is more personal and individual than truth? Truth wears a different dress for every one of us. And anyone’s truth can be a lie for everyone else.

  In a play, it’s important for the actors to agree on the question of how. That’s what creates a coherent collective vision of the performance. On the other hand, each actor will have a different vision of the why, which belongs to the domain of interpretation. Each person will slip the truth of his or her role into the workings of the collective vision. Whether verbally or tacitly, these truths will oppose one another individually onstage. And this will give rise to the most beautiful of lies: the theater. A lie that is true to life in endless ways. A play in which all the actors would be governed by the same truth could not possibly be a faithful reflection of the world we have a mission to represent. This world is filled with as many truths as it is with people. I don’t believe I could work with a director who would try to explain to me the why of my role or actions. I would see this as censorship, a violation of my integrity
and my vision, and a constraint upon my freedom as an actor.

  EPILOGUE

  To All Those Who

  To all those who tried to wall me up alive forever in my deathly silence.

  To all those who attempted to lock me up inside their glass prisons and padded cells.

  To all those who wanted to murder me and sacrifice my mother on the altar of ignorance and obscurantism.

  To all those who wear the trappings of learning yet preach only dogma.

  To all those who take part in the genocide of difference in the name of indifference.

  To all those who gratify their sadistic fantasies in the guise of false science.

  To all those who find love obscene and so want to crucify loving mothers.

  To all those inquisitors and fundamentalists who establish sects that are sick, destructive, and murderous.

  To all the uptight bullies and creeps who confuse maternal love with incest.

  I say NO.

  NO, my mother did not love me too much.

  I was loved.

  And I loved in return.

  Cannibal Yourself or What I Was Lucky to Have Been Spared

  Freezing towels, shock team, from two to five against one: the party can begin.

  After the electroshock, the lobotomy, and the straitjacket, welcome to the grand ritual of the cold pack.

  A child who doesn’t speak will do. He struggles, screams, he doesn’t want to go along. Ballet of the attendants alternating sweet-talking and strong-arm methods.

  It takes as long as it takes. There he is at last, lying down, subdued. His arms clamped along his sides.