The Man Who Risked It All
A
LSO BY
L
AURENT
G
OUNELLE
The Man Who Wanted to Be Happy
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Copyright © 2014 by Laurent Gounelle
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Cover design:
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Interior design:
Jenny Richards
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or persons living or deceased, is strictly coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gounelle, Laurent.
[Dieux voyagent toujours incognito. English]
The man who risked it all / Laurent Gounelle ; translated by Alan S. Jackson.—1st edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4019-3814-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Paris (France)—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Jackson, Alan S., translator. II. Title.
PQ2707.O928D5413 2012
843’.92—dc23 2013026744
Tradepaper ISBN
: 978-1-4019-3814-7
17 16 15 14 4 3 2 1
1st edition, March 2014
Printed in the United States of America
Life is a risk.
If you have not risked, you have not lived.
It’s what gives … that champagne taste.
Sœur Emmanuelle
CONTENTS
T
HE SOFT, WARM
night enveloped me. It was taking me in its arms, carrying me. I could feel my body melting into it, as if I were already floating in the air.
One more step …
I wasn’t afraid. And I didn’t want fear to arise suddenly and hold me back, spoiling everything.
I had imagined hearing the hubbub of the city, so I was surprised by the peace and quiet. Not silence, no, but peace and quiet. All the sounds that reached me were gentle, distant, soothing.
One little step …
Slowly, very slowly, I walked along the steel beam that the lights had transformed into dark gold. That night, the Eiffel Tower and I were as one. I was walking on gold, breathing in air that was warm and damp, with a strange scent that was enticing, intoxicating. Beneath me, 360 feet below, lay Paris, offering herself to me. Her twinkling lights were so many winking, calling eyes. Patiently, aware she was irresistible, she was waiting for my blood to come and fertilize her.
One more step …
I had thought it all out and carefully prepared for what I was about to do. I had chosen it, accepted it, made it part of me. Very calmly, I had made up my mind to end a life that was devoid of purpose or meaning, that no longer offered anything that was worth the trouble.
One step …
My life was a string of failures that had begun even before my birth. My father—if that’s what you can call the vulgar progenitor—had not even judged me worthy of knowing him. He had left my mother as soon as she told him she was pregnant.
Was it with the intention of getting rid of me that she had tried to drown her despair in a Paris bar? The many drinks she had consumed with the American businessman she met there did not, however, cloud her mind. He was 39; she was 26. She was anxious; his relaxed air reassured her. He seemed well off; she was struggling to survive. She gave herself to him that night, calculatingly and with hope. The next morning, she was tender and loving, and I will never know if it was sincerely or out of weakness that he said yes, of course, if ever she became pregnant, he wanted her to keep the child and stay by his side.
She followed him to the United States, and in the land of excess, nobody was surprised that I came into the world at seven-and-a-half months already weighing nearly six-and-a-half pounds. I was given an American name, and so I became Alan Greenmor, an American citizen. My mother learned English and managed as best she could to adapt to life in her adopted country. But things took a tragic turn. Five years after they arrived, my new father lost his job, and, unable to find another one during the pre-Reagan economic crisis, he spiraled down into alcoholism. He became bad-tempered, uncommunicative, and depressed. My mother was disgusted by his lack of initiative and constantly criticized him for his spinelessness. Deeply resentful, she continually looked for ways to provoke him, using the slightest transgression as an excuse to criticize him. His lack of reaction led her to increase the attacks, heaping on more and more insults. She seemed to derive some satisfaction when he at last got angry, preferring his anger to his apathy. I was terrified by her game. I loved my parents and couldn’t bear to see them destroying each other. My father’s fits of anger were rare but explosive, and I feared them as much as my mother desired them. When she at last got a reaction from him, she had an adversary, a man who could stand up for himself. She finally had an outlet for her built-up resentment, and she really lashed out with her tongue. One evening, my father beat her, and I was less traumatized by his violence than by the perverse pleasure I read on my mother’s face. One night, during a particularly terrible argument, my mother flung in his face that I was not really his son—a fact that I became aware of at the same time. He left the house the next day and was never seen again. My second father had left me as well.
My mother struggled to keep us alive. She worked long hours, six days a week, in a laundry. She brought its chemical smells home every night. When she came to kiss me at bedtime, I no longer recognized my mother’s much-loved scent, the scent that before had reassured me, inviting me to sleep as it enveloped me in tenderness.
One step, then another …
After my father left, my mother went from one low-level job to another, believing each time that she could rise up through the ranks, get a promotion, and earn more. She also went from lover to lover, with the hope of keeping one and setting up a home. I think one day she realized that all these hopes about her life were futile, and that is when she focused everything on me. I would succeed where she had failed. I would earn so much money that she would be wealthy, too. From that moment, my education became her absolute priority. I was ordered to bring home good grades. At meals, our conversation revolved around school, the teachers, my results. My mother became my trainer; I was her colt. Speaking French with her and English with the rest of the world, I had been bilingual from birth. She repeated endlessly that this was a major asset. I was sure to become an international businessman or a great interpreter. She even imagined me as Secretary of State. Only losers have no ambition, she said. I was very afraid of disappointing her, so I worked as hard as I could in school, getting good marks. But my success only increased her expectations of me; it confirmed that her strategy was working.
It was a terrible blow the day my mother learned that in the United States a college education isn’t free. It costs money, and top dollar at that. It was the first time I ever saw her downcast. All her plans were destroyed. Perhaps she really was cursed, but it didn’t take long for her natural character to regain the upper hand. She made an appointment with the principal of my school to convince him that a young American citizen shouldn’t be left by the wayside when his high grades were evidence of how he might serve his country if he were given access to the lofty positions a college education would ensure. There must be a solution, she said. Weren’t there scholarships or grants or something? She came home from the meeting all fired up. It was very simple, she said. There was a six-letter answer:
sports
. If I was very good at sports, there was a good chance a college would waive its tuition, just to get me on its team and increase its chances of winning tournaments.
And so, without ever daring to admit to my mother that I loathed sports, I was subjected to an intensive training regime. She pushed me, motivated me, encouraged me, continually scrutinizing my results. Now she seemed unconcerned about my grades. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she would repeat nonstop. In the end, it was baseball that I turned out to be least bad at. From then on, I lived for baseball. To motivate me, she pinned posters of the stars on the Detroit Tigers to my bedroom wall. I drank my breakfast milk from a mug with a picture of the Tigers on it. There were Tigers everywhere: on my key ring, my T-shirts, my socks, my bathrobe, my pens. I ate Tigers, I wrote Tigers, I washed Tigers, I even slept Tigers. Baseball haunted my dreams. My mother had succeeded in sponsoring my brain, sliding billboards into my thoughts. She enrolled me in Little League and worked overtime to pay the dues. I spent three hours a day minimum, five on weekends, playing baseball. The coach’s shouts still ring in my ears, all these years later. I hated the sport but I loved my mother, and I would have done anything not to disappoint her. She had spent her life keeping her hopes up, and I had the impression she would stop living the day she had nothing more to hope for.