Laughter and the tear

 

“They had known each other for so long, and each of them knew only too well what the other was going to say before he even opened his mouth.
Is there a moment, in most human relationships, when this kind of thing happens? he wondered.
When both participants feel that something vital in the relationship has died?
We are used to describing the decline of love in these terms, but is it not even more true of friendship?
Their relationship had hardened over the years to the point where each of them felt that everything the other did or said had already been said or done many times before.
The sense of the unexpected, that compost that nourishes human relationships, had been exhausted and had not been replaced by anything new, and yet neither of them could have said how or when it had happened.”

Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations, Les nomades, Quidam éditeur, p. 209

The wind and the rain had just begun to fall when Lucian rang at Félix’s door.
He had not slept.
The night had been crossed by sentences he had not written, by shivers that did not belong to him, and by a strange compassion mixed with shame… the shame of feeling affected by someone else’s story.
Félix opened the door with a broad gesture, like a theatre curtain being lifted without hesitation.
— Ah! My dear Lucian! he exclaimed. You have the face of a man who has just been attacked by his own patient.
He burst into a thunderous laugh that did not wound,
but rang out like a bell… and awakened what one preferred not to see.
Lucian came in and sat in the large red armchair, the one where, Félix liked to say, all psychoanalysts have their existential crises.
— Félix… I need to talk to you about Igniatius.
— Yes! The famous Don Carotte! I remember…
Félix closed his eyes and brought his hands together.
— I suspected he’d end up shaking you. He has that talent: the unexpected soul-teller.
Without replying, Lucian took out notebook no. 7 and placed it in front of Félix the way one lays down an unloaded weapon.
Then he unrolled Igniatius’s drawings:
the distorted volcanoes, the shifting ground, the islands stretching like badly-set limbs, the straw, the outline of a donkey, almost a breath drawn.
Félix immediately stopped smiling.
He sat up straight, serious, his chin resting on his hand.
— Speak, Lucian, he said. Tell me everything from the beginning. Without holding back.
And Lucian spoke. For a long time.
He told the scene of the storm, the name Igniatius resurfacing like a stone recovered from the bottom of a lake, the paradox of a child without parents heard as voices inside the drum of the sky, the silent beast, refuge, third, world.
He told of Igniatius’s anger, his pain, his reversal.
And that question he had addressed to him, which had disturbed him so deeply:
“Speak to me about yourself by speaking about me.”
Félix nodded in silence, then, before speaking, took the notebook. He leafed through it slowly, as if each sentence were a stone he had to turn over to examine its hidden face.
He stopped at the page where Lucian had written:
If I do not recognise my own involvement, it risks distorting our relationship.
— Ah, said Félix. Here is the line that rings true. This is where everything shifts.
He laid the notebook on his knees.
— Lucian, he said, this patient moves you. Too much. And not only because of his story. He touches you in a zone that precedes your own narrative. You have recognised that, in part. But you have not understood where it comes from.
Lucian wanted to protest, but Félix raised his hand, in a manner both gentle and incisive.
— I am not accusing you. All analysts one day meet their Igniatius. The question is not “Why is this happening to me?” but “Why is this happening with him?”
He picked up one of the drawings: the one where the volcano seems to breathe, almost human.
— Look at this. What he calls “Archipelago”, you call “analysis”. What moves in his islands is what you feel in your chest. You have entered his metaphor as one enters the bedroom… or the head of another.
Then he added, tilting his head:
— And he felt it. Exactly as a child without parents knows how to recognise, before being told, the slightest crack in an adult’s attention.
Félix let a silence spread, that dense silence which precedes an incision.
— Lucian… I’m going to be blunt, because you need someone to be.
He looked him straight in the eye.
— You were moved because you heard, in his storm, something you know. I don’t know what. But you do. And Igniatius sensed it before you.
Lucian lowered his eyes. His hands were trembling.
— I… I don’t understand, he murmured.
— Of course you don’t understand. If you understood, it would be less dangerous.
He gently took hold of his wrist; Félix never touched, except in moments of truth.
— It would seem that you have become, for Igniatius, what the donkey once was for him: the one who absorbs the noise, the one who listens in his place. Which is magnificent. And perilous.
Lucian felt a shiver run through him. Félix went on:
— The problem is not that he analyses you — all patients analyse. The problem is that he analyses you accurately. And that this relieves you as much as it terrifies you.
Lucian raised his head, stunned.
Félix smiled, a less cheerful smile, more knowing:
— He asked you: “When you write about me, is it me or is it you that you are describing?”
He placed a hand on the notebook.
— And you, Lucian, you were unable to answer… Because you do not know.
Lucian closed his eyes, along which a tear slowly slid.
Félix added:
— It is time to go and find where your own storm comes from. Not for him. For you.
Then he stood up, went to fetch a glass of water and set it before Lucian.
— Take your notes back. And now… tell me your very first memory of a sound in a house that was too big.

Lucian, eyes open onto the abyss and onto the image of his childhood, suddenly understood that the analysis had tipped over, that he had entered, despite himself, into Igniatius’s mirror.