(in which we see how Emmanuel Carrère manages to move a city to the edge of a lake)
Family life, like the different professions we have just examined, offers a number of notable situations in which the ability to speak of places you haven’t been to might be required. At least two of these situations—in which it is important to know how to make others believe that you were elsewhere—are worth calling to mind.
The first is adultery. If led to describe his daily activities, the person telling fibs to his official partner will necessarily be obliged at some point to talk about places he hasn’t been to, since he is unable to talk about those he really went to at that time.
The second, murder, is fortunately less common, but any one of us might become confronted with the necessity of having to take this route to ensure our peace and quiet one day. The way of proving that you were somewhere other than the place where the murder was committed has a name, an alibi, and it is often crucial for the accused to be able to furnish one that seems valid.
The term alibi moreover could refer to the whole set of issues studied in this book if we think about it, since all armchair travelers go about things in the same way assassins do, situating themselves fictionally in a different place from wherever they were in reality.
Many people know the terrible story of Jean-Claude Romand, the man who led his family and friends to believe for twenty years that he was a medical specialist, occupying an important position at the World Health Organization in Geneva, while in reality, he never made it through the second year of university.
Romand wasn’t happy with just pretending to hold a prestigious medical position. He invented for himself—and without doubt ended up believing—a complete alternative existence in which he often traveled abroad, brushed shoulders with important figures in scientific research and politics and shone like a diamond in the salons and corridors of power.
To survive for such a long time without any income while living the kind of lifestyle befitting a medical specialist employed by an international organization, Romand was reduced to practicing scams—for example, divesting his family-in-law of all their savings by claiming to have invested them, and selling fake cancer medicines.
Curiously, during all those years, none of the people close to Romand, nor anyone he came across or conversed with about his imaginary life, ever seemed to have noticed the improbability of his accounts, nor tried to verify what he said by inquiring at the WHO or consulting a medical directory, for example.
Yet sensing that the moment was approaching when he would be unmasked once and for all, and no longer able to handle his financial situation, Romand decided to bring his life to an end, as well as his wife’s, his children’s and his parents’. But, though he killed his relatives, he failed at his own suicide, was tried and given a nonreducible life sentence of a minimum of twenty-two years.
Just a few days after this multiple murder, the writer Emmanuel Carrère became interested in the Romand affair, which he had read about in the papers:
On the morning of Saturday, January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our oldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal. I usually devote Saturday afternoons and Sunday to my family, but I spent the rest of that weekend alone in my studio because I was finishing a book I’d been working on for over a year, a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The last chapter described the days he spent in a coma before his death. I finished it on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday morning opened my newspaper to the lead article on the Romand case.1As the parallel between their two lives suggests, Emmanuel Carrère soon felt moved to action by the Romand affair and even came to experience a kind of fascination for the murderer, expressed in the first letter he sent to him in prison, six months later:
I am a writer, the author to date of seven books; I enclose a copy of my latest work. Ever since reading about your case in the newspapers I have been haunted by the tragedy of which you were the agent and sole survivor.2Although equally interested in setting up a meeting, Romand, on his lawyer’s advice, waited for the investigation of his case to be closed before entering into correspondence with Carrère and agreeing for the latter to write a book about him.
Carrère then undertook to investigate the affair, reconstructed Romand’s life and visited its primary locations, followed the trial, met the murderer on several occasions and, after many years of work which he almost abandoned due to the psychological stress of it all, managed to write and publish The Adversary.
In his book on the Romand affair, Emmanuel Carrère doesn’t just reconstruct the murderer’s life, he tries to get on the inside, taking advantage of his emotional closeness to the man to experience and have his reader experience what his protagonist felt. More than just an investigation, it becomes a simultaneous, double investigation Carrère makes not just into Romand, but also into himself.
During this quest, Emmanuel Carrère grows particularly interested in the periods that seemed to him to mark the essence of Romand’s existence, namely the interminable days he was forced to spend away from home in complete indolence, due to the lack of a professional occupation:
In the beginning he went to WHO every day, later on less regularly. Instead of the road to Geneva, he’d take the one to Gex and Divonne or the one to Bellegarde, that leads to the motorway and Lyon. He’d stop at a news-stand to buy an armful of papers: dailies, magazines, scientific journals. Then he’d go and read them, either in a café—he was careful to change cafés often and to choose them far enough from home—or in his car. He would park in a carpark or at a service station and stay there for hours, reading, taking notes, dozing. He’d have a sandwich for lunch and continue reading throughout the afternoon in a different café, at a different service station.3At other times, Romand prepared his virtual trips abroad and Carrère imagines scenes in which he researches places he hasn’t been in order to be able to convincingly describe his travels to his family:
Lastly, there were the trips—conferences, seminars, symposiums, all over the world. He would buy a guide to the country; Florence would pack his suitcase. He’d drive off in his car, which he would supposedly leave in the long-term carpark at Geneva airport. In a modern hotel room, often near the airport, he would take off his shoes, stretch out on the bed, spend three or four days watching television and the planes taking off and landing outside his window.4Romand didn’t just buy travel guides for the countries he was supposed to be visiting. He put together the entire story of his trip in order to be believed by his loved ones when he returned:
He studied the guidebooks so he wouldn’t make any mistakes in his stories when he got home. He telephoned his family every day to tell them what time it was and what the weather was like in São Paulo or Tokyo. He’d ask how things were going in his absence. He’d tell his wife, his children, his parents that he missed them, was thinking of them, sent them a big kiss. He phoned no one else: whom would he have called? After a few days, he went home with presents bought in an airport gift shop. Everyone made a fuss over him. He was tired from jet lag.5And so there are—aside from the interior place where he sought permanent exile—a multitude of imaginary realms that, during his alternative existence, Romand undertook to reinvent to maintain his wealthy identity and protect the bond he had with his loved ones from an unbearable reality.
Even more than in the previous cases, we see how the opposition of real and imaginary places, and the partial or complete substitution of one for the other, only make sense when they are discussed in the context of that third space I suggested calling the “inner landscape,” after Freud. Here in this case of absolute mythomania (compulsive lying), the inner landscape has become all pervasive.
Whereas in the previous examples, it only interfered with a limited part of the reality it played a part in distorting, here the inner landscape has become the subject’s alternative reality and that of those close to them. Where Margaret Mead let herself go in a fantastical reverie about an imaginary island, where Jayson Blair reconstructed places he might have been to, where Rosie Ruiz invented the ideal moment of bliss by erasing the surrounding space, Romand goes much further by forging all the parts of a second personality that allows him to survive. This second personality even becomes necessary, to the point of having to resort to murder when it risks being unmasked.
The same issue is at work in each of these different examples, whether the discourse on places these armchair travelers have not visited leads to success or to failure. For them it is a matter of finding, in greater or lesser denial of a disappointing reality, an ideal, fantasy place—that of the narcissistic pleasure an infant experiences in his mother’s gaze and which is lost forever.
This unfindable ideal site of primitive pleasure, which we might call an original place, is something Romand won’t stop trying to reinvent; he doesn’t just limit himself to a single episode in his life but transforms the entire world in his mind to fit his purpose. We might suppose that he found shades of the lost bliss of the child in the dazzled eyes of his own children, filled with admiration like Wendy in Peter Pan as they listened to the tales of his heroic exploits on the other side of the world.
And it is no trivial matter that it was to his children—and to the child inside himself who hadn’t wanted to grow up, we can surmise—that Romand recounted his travels to imaginary realms he’d never visited, as though he himself, like Peter Pan, hadn’t managed to evolve, or feared that his children too would be confronted with the pain of becoming adults one day.
If I wholeheartedly support Margaret Mead’s struggle to introduce libertinage to the Samoan Islands and Rosie Ruiz’s attempt to legitimize the right to use public transport during sporting activities, if I can understand that Jayson Blair, under the influence of alcohol and drugs, described places in the United States he hadn’t visited, there can obviously be no question of approving Jean-Claude Romand’s behavior, especially once you know of its dramatic conclusion.
The fact remains that one can understand Carrère’s fascination with Romand, a fascination that was so great he dedicated several years of his life to writing Romand’s story and started to feel like he was losing his sanity. Interestingly enough, Romand has several things in common with writers, and in particular novelists. To start with, both handle questions of identity to a great degree. Just as novelists project themselves onto their imaginary characters, allowing themselves to limit denial to one area of their thoughts, Romand invented the entire persona of a great doctor, which he then acted out to perfection over many years. Similarly, the question of knowing who we are is something that has haunted Carrère for his entire literary career, starting with his early novel The Mustache (1987), and has since become its major theme.
Who are we, and more particularly, what is the nature of that dark side that threatens to engulf everything? Carrère recounts how Romand didn’t really feel comfortable with him until he read his novel La classe de neige, a frightening story in which a child begins to realize, little by little, that his father is a murderer. But the question of knowing who we are is evidently not just about our internal dualities, it is also about the criminal potential that can arise in us in certain circumstances and whose uncontrollable power Romand experienced.
However, it is not just the question of identity that brings the two men together, it is also a form of relationship to space. Returning to his own passion for the Jean-Claude Romand case, Carrère suggests several times that there are commonalities between his life as a writer and the falsified existence of a killer, one of which is their relationship to place.
Evoking the endless days that Romand spent bored and alone—a duration of the kind that fascinates him, situated outside of any temporality—he proposes a significant parallel to the days spent by any writer:
I reread the letter he’d sent me with directions, I looked at the water, looked up at the grey sky to follow the flight of birds whose name I didn’t know—I can’t identify birds or trees and I find that sad. It was chilly. I started the engine to get some heat. The hot air made me sleepy. I thought about the studio where I go every morning after driving my children to school. This studio exists, people can visit me and phone me there. That’s where I write and piece together screenplays that usually get filmed. But I know what it’s like to spend all one’s days unobserved: the hours passed staring at the ceiling, the fear of no longer existing. I wonder what he felt in his car? Pleasure? A mocking exultation at the idea of so masterfully fooling everyone around him? No, I was sure of that.6In the passage that immediately follows this one, he evokes Romand’s imaginary travels. Carrère explains that one of the places the fake doctor went to during his extratemporal peregrinations was the town of Divonne,7 which is where one of his earlier novels, Hors d’atteinte?, is set, a novel that describes how a teacher slowly succumbs to a gambling obsession:
Divonne is a small spa near the Swiss border best known for its casino. I once used it as a setting for a few pages of a novel about a woman who lives a double life and tried to lose herself in the world of gambling. The novel was meant to be realistic and well-researched but, since I hadn’t visited all the casinos I wrote about, I put Divonne on the shores of Lake Geneva when it’s really about six miles away. There is actually something there referred to as a lake, but it’s only a small sheet of water next to the place where Romand often parked. I parked there, too. It’s the clearest memory I’ve kept of my first trip to the landscape of his life.8
In so doing, the writer rewrites the world and transforms it in the same way the mythomaniac killer does, albeit on a completely different scale. Both are confronted with the difficulty of inhabiting a space and neither of them succeeds in finding an adequate place—that is to say, a balance between the inner landscape and the real world—both of them finding themselves compelled to rewrite places in order to construct a makeshift identity.
Carrère’s studio and Romand’s car are nonspaces that they are forced to inhabit through professional necessity, but also because they respond to a profound psychological inability to invent an autonomous space that would allow them to establish their identity in a permanent manner.
Rewriting places, practiced to varying degrees by both of these men, has to do with the fact that they feel, probably more sorely than anyone else, that the space they inhabit deep down does not correspond to the real space that existence has led them to occupy, hence them finding themselves constantly driven to reshaping it in order to inhabit it.
The major difference between the two situations is that Carrère’s empty studio, however anguishing it may be, is a place of research and self-exploration, while the car Romand uses to endlessly roam the roads for years is nothing but the burial chamber of an identity lost in the imaginary sparkle of his invented accounts.
So we are dealing—writers undoubtedly more often than others—with complex spaces with indistinguishable boundaries that can only be imperfectly superimposed on the spaces of the real world, spaces we never stop transforming to suit our travels through our inner landscapes.
Based on the idea that writers, more than ourselves, live in aberrant spaces irreducible to real ones, I now propose in a final section to move on to some practical advice, taken from my long experience of armchair travel, for anyone finding themselves in a situation where they have to describe, for whatever professional or criminal reason, places they have never been to.
1.L’Adversaire (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 2001), 9. Published in English as The Adversary in a translation by Linda Coverdale (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).
2. Ibid., 36.
3. Ibid., 96.
4. Ibid., 97.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 99.
7. UP–
8. Ibid., 98.
From:
How to Talk About Places You've Never Been
By PIERRE BAYARD
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