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Édouard Levé

SUICIDE

^{TRANSLATED AND WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JAN STEYN}

One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this. She stays outside. The weather is fine. She’s making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot. She rushes into the house, cries out your name, notices that the door to the stairway leading to the basement is open, goes down, and finds you there. You’ve put a bullet in your head with the rifle you had carefully prepared. On the table, you left a comic book open to a double-page spread. In the heat of the moment, your wife leans on the table; the book falls closed before she understands that this was your final message.

I have never gone into this house. Yet I know the garden, the ground floor, and the basement. I’ve replayed the scene hundreds of times, always in the same settings, those I imagined upon first hearing the account of your suicide. The house is on a street, it has a roof and a rear façade. Though none of that is real. There’s the garden where you go out into the sunlight for the last time and where your wife waits for you. There is the façade she runs toward when she hears the gunshot. There is the entryway where you keep your racket, there’s the door to the basement and the stairway. Finally there’s the basement where your body lies. It is intact. From what I’ve been told, your skull hasn’t exploded. You’re like a young tennis player resting on the lawn after a match. You could be sleeping. You are twenty-five years old. You now know more about death than I do.

Your wife screams. No one is there to hear her, aside from you. The two of you are alone in the house. In tears, she throws herself on you and beats your chest out of love and rage. She takes you in her arms and speaks to you. She sobs and falls against you. Her hands slide over the cold, damp basement floor. Her fingers scrape the ground. She stays for fifteen minutes and feels your body go cold. The telephone brings her out of her torpor. She finds the strength to get up. It’s the person with whom you had a tennis date.

“Hello, what’s going on? I’m waiting for you. ”

“He’s dead. Dead,” she responds.

The scene stops there. Who removed the body? The firemen? The police? Since murder can be disguised as suicide, did a forensic pathologist do an autopsy? Was there an inquest? Who decided that it was a suicide and not a crime? Did they question your wife? Were they sensitive or were they suspicious when talking to her? Did she have the pain of being a suspect added to the pain of your disappearance?

I haven’t seen your wife since. I hardly knew her. I met her four or five times. When the two of you got married, you and I stopped seeing each other. I see her face again now. It has remained unchanged for twenty years. I’ve retained a fixed image of her from the last time I saw her. Memory, like photographs, freezes recollections.