The Emperor, C'est Moi Read online

  The child finds himself wrapped in icy wet swaddling cloths. Seven days a week for several months. Mummified. In wrappings chilled to 41 degrees Fahrenheit, his body at 91.4 degrees, for forty-five minutes. Longer if necessary.

  While his body slowly warms up again, the child gazes into the eyes of his torturers. His gaze usually vacant . . .

  Perhaps a word escapes his cold lips. His mute lips. . . .

  The chief attendant then exclaims, “What great progress!”

  Seven days a week for several months.

  All that for that.

  You’ll tell me: We’ve seen worse things . . .

  Yes, in Guantánamo.

  In Praise of the Norm

  Talking so much about Julien has led me to wonder if I’m not speaking of someone else. I admit that I’ve done my best to make sure he never shows up again. I buried him alive under clods of black earth. I asphyxiated and decapitated him until I’d almost forgotten him. I even denied his very existence. But I knew that sooner or later, he’d rise up again.

  At a masked ball, you don’t walk around with your face uncovered. The word “normal” means nothing. It’s a fog of nonsense. A hoax. And yet, I’ve learned to wear a mask over my difference. Dissimulation? Imposture? No. Survival.

  Be beyond suspicion. Stand up straight. Keep your gaze steady. Look others in the eye. Don’t move your hands too much. Draw strength from the ground, and walk. You’re too stiff. Relax. Don’t let any effort show. Composure with just a hint of private amusement. There. That’s good.

  The obsession with control Hugo developed often protected me, but can also destroy me by locking me within a different prison. That’s the problem with any weapon: it can turn on anyone using it at any time. And that’s me.

  As I end this story, I feel empty. Words in my head are jamming up into incoherence. The wellspring has dried up. The riverbed is parched. The reflection I used to see there is gone. All I can see is arid ground.

  I’m crawling through a desert. Without air or water. My strength and nerve are both gone. I close my eyes and see the black earth.

  Standing before his grave, Julien asks, “Who are you?”

  Hugo replies, “I am the one who lets you—makes you—speak to the world.”

  Julien: “Without me you’re nothing.”

  Hugo: “Without me you die.”

  When the Storm Has Passed

  We all have a tempest that thunders in our heads. Sometimes so deafeningly that even our thoughts desert us, reducing us to silence. When the tempest is over, only a field of ruins remains. The vestiges of a lost kingdom to be restored.

  Julien woke up long enough for a book. Now he sleeps peacefully. Ivy has covered his tombstone. Flowers grow on the black earth. The grave has become a flourishing garden. A birdcage lies tipped over on the ground, empty. The turtledove has flown away and is singing again.

  The storm has passed.

  I’m leaning back against my weeping willow. It’s weeping. It weeps for me.

  The laughter, I’m keeping that. I need it.

  AFTERWORD

  by Françoise Lefèvre

  My Child of the Abyss

  Thirty years have passed.

  Today, Hugo, you are the one writing.

  I am the one reading you.

  You composed this text in barely a month. Reading you, I understand the urgency of your effort, I discover your pain and my first reaction is tears. How could the child you were, a child so young, my child, have managed to focus so much secret energy on wishing not to be in the world. Not to be of this world. Unless it was not to be of this society . . .

  To avoid being in this world and to protect himself, how could a small being barely three years old set in motion a veritable war machine against himself and others and, acting as an implacable strategist, organize his own chaos?

  These pages reveal how many abysses, crevasses, chasms you must have had to avoid. To shut out others, you must have had to build a Great Wall of China, with ramparts and fortifications. You’d taken command of an army deployed on an invisible battlefield where you led covert operations.

  As a redoubtable tactician, you directed sweeping maneuvers wherever we went. In the hall, the kitchen, the staircase, the bedroom, but also in the car, the street, on the sidewalks, in the parks and shops. We had to concentrate on every one of our footsteps, bypassing the obstacles of your imaginary world. Above all: avoid crushing anything. You alone knew the blueprints of your universe and supervised the slightest of our movements in your minefields full of hidden traps. In your world there were people who’d been shot, prisoners awaiting execution, battalions of infantry ready to fire, hills, bridges, rivers, flags, foundered horses, dungeons, prisons. A whole world in marching order commanded by you alone. In the kitchen and along the hall, certain tiles were taboo; white ones were safer than black. Skip those two. Step back onto this one. This tile is safe to stand on . . . You watched for the smallest infraction, especially when we had a visitor, but also with strangers in the street. They were immediately taken hostage. That’s why going outside the house was so draining. If anyone dared venture into your territory bristling with ferociously organized constraints, deadly pitfalls, dungeons, oubliettes, barricades, impassible walls and compulsory paths, your explosive rage annihilated me.

  This refusal of our world was something I had always understood. I even admired it. I was on your side. I respected your capacity for resistance. Most of all, I thought that in the place where you were locked up—but where was it?—you were suffering atrociously. So when your demented rages left me spent, I tried to find in that exhaustion new strength to fight on, not against you, but at your side. I was sure you understood that I was your ally, that I loved you and would never abandon you. I would never leave you as fodder for so-called specialized institutions. They would not snatch from me what I considered one of my most beautiful love stories. I, too, was developing my defenses. I knew I would need them.

  With you, I sometimes laughed. I laughed a lot. I have never dared say that, or write it. Today I am doing both.

  I remember an episode in a perfume store at Christmastime. You must have been five years old. You had decided to entangle the counters, display units, and customers with some thin gift-wrap ribbon that you were happily reeling off its spool. Some of those waiting in a long line didn’t immediately protest, others smiled vaguely, still others were quite angry, especially when you encircled their ankles and they couldn’t move forward to pay for their purchases. I think that you were taking them prisoner. But this time, you were acting in the real world and you were going to confront real hostages. Some exasperated women tried to kick free of that damned ribbon and pushed you back with their feet. I knew that if I intervened, your shrieks would blow the boutique, the sidewalk, and the street to smithereens. I considered the pyramids of perfume bottles that might collapse, but I decided to let you go up against all these people so that you might understand—at least that was my hope—that refusals did not always come from me.

  I help an elderly lady get free of this gift-wrap ribbon that has just run one of her stockings. She is furious. I am destroying your work. Daring to intervene on your field of battle. You scream and writhe on the floor. Cutting remarks and criticisms rain down. You are considered a spoiled, unbearable, unruly little monster. In a way, they are right. Useless to explain. Useless. All things considered, I prefer silence. I try to pick you up, but you struggle. I wind up with a shouting gnome in my arms. It’s a battle. I manage to extract you from the store. I’m shaking with fatigue. It’s freezing cold, but I’m drenched in sweat. I try to talk to you, to calm you down, but you throw yourself to the sidewalk and roll into the gutter. You cry and cry. You cry from helplessness. You cry over being so little. Impossible to go near you. Impossible to console you. Faced with such suffering, I no longer know what to do. With my fists jammed into
my pockets, I look at the sky. It’s blue. But hard. Really hard.

  In 1990, with the publication of Le Petit Prince cannibale (Actes Sud), I told our story. You were eight at the time. My book reached quite a large audience and helped change how infantile autism was viewed in France. And many people challenged me. Psychoanalysts, medical personnel, autism parents’ associations . . . There was even one pedopsychiatrist, the mother of an autistic child, who declared, “In the end, Madame L.’s book makes us out to be bad mothers.” At the time, but today as well, people thought and said that autism could not be beaten. Such attitudes found support in the theses Bruno Bettelheim developed in his book The Empty Fortress. Fortress, yes. But not empty. Inhabited. Fully inhabited. Terribly inhabited by a walled-in, fragile, sensitive creature in danger. With every fiber in my being, I felt that atrocious suffering and its strangeness, too. That inability to communicate. Walled up alive: that’s what you were.

  After one of those inadequate and heartbreaking sessions in the hospital, where I felt the weight of accusation directed at me, the mother, I decided to let all that go, to save my strength and save us both. Giving nothing up to them, not letting ourselves be sucked into that black hole. I would blaze paths to go toward you. I would invent another language. I would enter your world. Instinctively, without even knowing that these things existed in other countries, I provided intensive stimulation and education when you were still very little. We had to stay away from all “official” treatments. I was revolted by the smugness, arrogance, stupidity, spinelessness, and dogmatic attitudes of those who opposed us.

  Even today, thirty years later, almost nothing has changed. We find the same useless care, founded solely on psychoanalysis, and other humiliating or even brutal treatments. Distressingly ineffective, wait-and-see methods that are ruining our national health service. Like that cold-pack treatment you describe in your chapter entitled “Cannibal Yourself, or What I Was Lucky to Have Been Spared.” We are beginning, though, to sense a change within the associations of the parents of autistic children and in the approaches of certain medical personnel. There is a new appreciation for the legitimacy of intensive or “cognitive” educational methods, such as cognitive behavior therapy, developed in other countries.

  During one crucial scene—and I mean crucial—that you recount in this book, you demand that I give you another name. You are six years old. Afterward I asked you why, when you were younger, you didn’t want to talk, or chew, or defecate—to the point of being hospitalized for a dangerous blockage. Your answer was: “Because I wanted to go back into your belly.” To me, those words were a frightening gift. Why frightening? Because you had revealed something vital to me, something torn from your thoughts, your logic, your distress. What you had told me allowed me to understand your refusal to be in the world. You had given me the keys. I agreed to call you Hugo. You asked me to forget Julien, who in your words had to “go back where he came from.” It was Julien who wanted to return to my womb, not Hugo. As you saw it, in order for Hugo to evolve in our world, he had to abandon Julien and I had to abandon him as well. And I knew that I would still have to accompany Hugo for a long time yet.

  Yes, those words were a frightening gift, because at a time when everything was polluted by cheap psychoanalytic dogmas, I could not talk to anyone about what you’d said. What would I have heard in return? She wants to keep him for herself. She doesn’t want to let go of him. She’s a castrating mother. A crocodile mother, and so on. Once more, I kept silent. My only thought was of what courage you’d needed to answer my question and to find your way all by yourself. You never explained yourself again on that point until you wrote this book. Thirty years later, it informs the chapter entitled “Hugo Versus Julien.” And there you explain yourself.

  You decided to write. Who could tell your story better than you? Who could remember it better than you? Who could write and talk about it better than you? To say where you come from.

  These days, controversy builds around autism, as the proponents of educational therapies confront the supporters of psychoanalysis. Early diagnosis is still criticized, and autistic children are still stuffed with antipsychotic drugs. Children are still locked up. Without any hope of escape.

  Although I cried as I read your book, I also thought about my joy in being your mother. With you I learned patience, resistance, tolerance, and insolence, Hugo.

  When you were six you told me, “When I daydream, I see an image, I lock it in and I enter my dream. Then I am free.” Today, you are the one creating the images. You are a director. An actor. An author.

  Godspeed, Hugo!

  I’ve adored being your mother.