"Mama!"
Ecstatic mother.
And, as I didn’t want to upset the delicate balance of things, I quickly added, "Papa!" Father dissolved in tenderness.
My parents scooped me up and showered me with kisses. All I could think was how simple they were, really. They would have been less delighted had I started out with something along the lines of, “There are snakes hissing on your heads” or, “all is in flux.” It was as if they doubted their own identity. Weren’t they already sure enough of being my mother and father without me calling them “Mama” and “Papa"? They seemed to need me to confirm their roles in life.
However, all in all, I was pleased with my choices. No first words could have given my begetters greater satisfaction. I had also fulfilled my obligation to family life. The whole issue of the third word was deeply exciting. I had maintained the family hierarchy, and now was free to turn to other matters. This freedom was so daunting that for a very long time I didn’t utter that third word, which flattered my parents even more. “She only needed to name us. We are her greatest necessity.”
They didn’t know that inside my head I had been talking for some quite some time. Saying something out loud is different, however. It confers an exceptional value on the word spoken. It lends the word weight, gives it life, recognition, as if you’re repaying a debt to it, or celebrating its essence. To say the word “banana” is to offer homage to all the bananas that have existed across the centuries.
I thought very hard about what to say next, beginning a phase of intense intellectual exploration that went on for weeks. Photos taken of me during this period show me looking so preoccupied as to seem comic. This was because of the inner dialogue in which I was engaged. “Shoe"? Not important enough; you could walk without it. “Paper"? Yes, but a pencil was just as important, and choosing between the two would have been impossible. “Chocolate?” No, that was a secret. “Sea lion"? Sea lions were wonderful and always elicited burbles of delight, but were they really better than, say, a top? Tops were wonderful, too. But sea lions were alive. Which was better, a spinning top or a living sea lion? The inability to decide made me choose neither. “Harmonica"? It sounded nice, but was it really necessary? “Glasses"? They were funny, but didn’t serve any purpose I could see. “Xylophone?” And so it went.
One day my mother came into the living room pulling a creature by its elongated neck and attaching its long, thin tail to a wall. She pushed a button and the beast sputtered to life with a loud, plaintive whine. The head started to move on the ground, backward and forward, pushing my mother’s arm with it. Sometimes the body moved on paws that were actually wheels.
This was not the first time I had seen a vacuum cleaner, but it was the first time I had truly considered it. I approached it on all fours so as to put myself at its level.
I knew that it was always necessary to examine objects at their own level I followed the movement of its head and rested my cheek on the rug to see what happened. The result was miraculous: the thing swallowed up the little things that it came upon and made them disappear.
It therefore replaced something with nothing—an act that could only be divine in origin.
I had the vague idea of having been God, and not very long before. A loud voice in my head sometimes plunged me into a deep reverie. Remember, I live inside you! Remember! I didn’t know what I thought about this, though the idea of my divinity seemed both probable and pleasing.
Now suddenly I had a brother: the vacuum. What could be more divine than this pure annihilator of material things? God had to have such power.
Anch’io sono pittore! Correggio was said to have exclaimed when he first discovered Raphael’s paintings. Matching that enthusiasm, I was on the point of crying out, “I’m a vacuum, too!” but at the last second remembered that I needed to be careful. I was thought to be in command of two words. Suddenly uttering a complete sentence wouldn’t do. At least I had found my third word. Opening my mouth, I produced the requisite syllables.
“Vacuum!”
My mother immediately let go of the neck and ran to the phone.
“Guess what?” she asked my father. “She’s just said her third word!"
"What is it?"
“ ‘Vacuum!’ “
"Well, maybe she’ll grow up to be a first-class maid.”
He was obviously a little disappointed.
I had gone all out for that third word, and decided that I could allow myself to be a Lite less philosophical when it came to the fourth. I decided that naming my sister, who was two and a half years older than I, would be the right thing to do.
"Juliette!” I exclaimed, looking into her eyes.
What power language had! The very second I said her name we were all over each other. My sister took me in her arms and held me tight. Her name, stronger than Tristan and Isolde’s love elixir, bonded us for life.
As far as the fifth word went, pronouncing my brother’s name was out of the question. He was four years older than I, and had once spent an entire afternoon reading his Tintin comic while sitting on my head. He loved to torture me. To punish him, I decided he would remain unnamed. He therefore didn’t truly exist.
Nishio-san was my Japanese nanny. She was goodness itself and devoted herself to me with endless patience. She spoke only Japanese, but I understood everything she said. My fifth word was her name.
I had therefore given names to four people. Each time, I had made them so happy that no longer could I question the importance of words. The proof was that these people were there. I concluded that they had needed me to help them exist.
Did that mean that speaking gave life? This was far from clear, I thought. People around me spoke from morning to night, and their words often produced neither monumental nor even discernible results. With my parents, for example, speaking could involve something like the following:
"I invited the Whatstheirnames for the twenty-sixth.”
"Who are the Whatstheirnames?"
"Oh come on, Daniéle, you know very well who they are. We’ve only had dinner with them twenty times.”
"I still don’t remember. Who are they again?"
"You’ll see.”
I did not get the impression that the Whatstheirnames were any more alive as a result of this exchange. Just the opposite, in fact.
And for my brother and sister, speaking often came down to the following:
“Where’s my box of LEGOs?”
"Don’t know.”
"Liar! You took it!"
"Did not.”
"Tell me where it is!"
And then they hit each other. Talking was a prelude to fighting.
When dear, sweet Nishio-san spoke to me, it was most often to tell me, with that laugh the Japanese reserve for truly horrific matters, how her sister had been run over by the Kobe-to-Nishinomiya train when a child. Every time Nishio-san told me this story, she killed the poor little girl all over again. Talking was useful for killing someone.
Careful examination of what other people said led me to the conclusion that speaking was as much a creative as a destructive act. I decided I would need to be careful about what to do with this discovery.
I had also noted that words could be harmless. “Nice weather, isn’t it?” or “Sweetie, don’t you look terrific!” were phrases with absolutely zero impact. You could utter them without fear. You could even not utter them at all. When someone used them it was probably to alert someone else that they were not going to kill him. It was like my brother’s squirt gun. When he shot it at me and said, “Bang! You’re dead!” I didn’t die; I only got wet. He said this kind of thing to show me he was shooting blanks. My sixth word was “death.”
THE HOUSE SEEMED ABNORMALLY QUIET. I Went downstairs to find out what was going on. My father was in the living room, crying. This was an unimaginable sight, and one that was never to be repeated. My mother held him in her arms as if he were a child.
She told me very softly, “Your papa ha
s lost his mama. Your grandmother is dead.”
I looked like I was going to throw a tantrum.
My mother continued. “I know you don’t know what ‘death’ means. You’re only two and a half.”
"Death!” I said in an assertive tone, then turned around and left the room.
Death! As if I didn’t know! As if my two and a half years were behind me, when actually their effects stretched out before me. Death! Who knew better than I did what it meant? I had just escaped it. I knew
more about it than the other children. I had extended non-life out beyond human limits. Had I not just spent two years living in a coma (for all that it can be said that one lives in a coma)? What had they thought I was doing in my crib all that time, if not killing life, killing time, killing fear, killing nothing?
Death was something I had examined carefully. Death was the ceiling. When you knew the ceiling better than you knew yourself, that was death. The ceiling was what kept your eyes from seeing higher and your thoughts from rising. When you said “ceiling” you mean “tomb.” The ceiling was the top of the skull. When death came, a giant lid was lowered onto your brainpan. Something uncommon had happened to me: I had lived it in the other direction, at an age when my memory, if it could not retain death, could at least preserve its faint impression.
When the subway comes out of the tunnel, when the black curtains are thrown open, when asphyxia stops, when the only eyes we need to see us look at us anew, the lid of death lifts, and the tomb of our brain stands opens to the endless sky.
Those who have known death from close up and survived turn into Eurydices: they know that something in them recalls death too clearly and that it is best not to look at it in the face. Like a terrier, like a room with closed curtains, like solitude, death is both horrible and seductive. We feel we might be happy there. All we have to do is let ourselves fell into hibernation. So compelling is Eurydice that sometimes we forget why we should resist her.
But we must resist, if only for the reason that our voyage is one way. And if it isn’t, we don’t need to resist at all.
I SAT ON THE STAIRS, thinking about my grandmother and her white chocolate. She had helped liberate me from death, and soon after it was her turn. I felt there had been some kind of exchange. She had paid for my life with hers. Had she known that?
My memory would keep her alive. My grandmother had given me memory. A fair return. She is still alive, carrying her bar of white chocolate like a queen her scepter. This is my way of giving her back what she gave me.
I didn’t cry. I went back to my room and played with that most wonderful of all things, the top. I made it spin round and round, watching with fascination, hour after hour. Perpetual motion lent me a look of gravity.
YES, I UNDERSTOOD what death was. But understanding wasn’t enough. I had so many questions to ask. The problem was that, officially, I was limited to the use of six words and not one of them so far as I knew was a verb. How hard it was to ask a question without a verb. In my head, of course, I had all the words I needed, but how was I to go from being thought capable of uttering six words to uttering a thousand—-just like that—without revealing my secret?
My solution was my nanny, Nishio-san. She spoke, as I’ve said, only Japanese, and this limited her exchanges with my mother. I could conceal myself behind her language.
"Nishio-san, why do we die?"
"You can talk!"
"Yes, but don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.”
"But your parents would be pleased to know you can talk!"
"I want to surprise them. Why do we die?"
"Because God wills it.”
"Do you believe that?"
"I don’t know. I have seen many people die. My sister was hit by a train. My parents and brothers were killed by bombs during the war. I don’t know whether or not God wanted them to die.”
"So why do we die?"
“Are you thinking about your grandmother? Dying when you’re old is normal.”
"Why?"
"When one has lived a long life, one is tired. For an old person, dying is like going to sleep. It is a good thing.”
"What about dying young?"
"I don’t know why that happens… . Do you really understand everything I’m saying to you?"
"Yes.”
"You learned how to speak Japanese before you learned to speak French?"
"They’re the same thing.”
And indeed, I hadn’t known there were such things as separate languages, only that there was one great big language and that one could choose either the Japanese version of it or the French version, whichever you preferred. I had not yet heard a language I couldn’t understand.
"If it’s the same thing, why can’t I speak French?"
"I don’t know. Tell me about the bombs.”
"Are you sure you want to know?"
"Yes.”
Nishio-san began to speak of the nightmare. One morning in 1945, when she was seven, bombs started to rain down on Kobe. She had heard them before, but only far off in the distance. That morning, Nishio-san knew that these bombs were for intended for her family, and she was right. She was lying on the tatami, hoping that death would come to her while she was asleep. Suddenly there was an enormous explosion right next to her, and she felt ripped into tiny pieces. Surprised to discover that she was alive, she tried to move, to find out whether her limbs were still attached to her body, but something prevented her. It took her a while to realize that she had been buried alive.
She started to dig with her hands, hoping she was digging upward, though not certain this was so. Then she came across something in the dirt—an arm. She didn’t know whether or not it was still attached to a body, but she knew for certain that its owner was dead.
Suddenly she thought she might be digging in the wrong direction. She stopped and listened. I must head toward the noise. That is where there is life. She had heard cries and started to dig in their direction.
“How did you breathe?” I asked.
"I don’t know. Somehow I did. There are animals that live in the earth, and they manage. There was little air, but there was some. Do you want to know what happened next?"
I replied enthusiastically that I did.
Finally, Nishio-san came to the surface. That is where there is life remained her guiding instinct. It had misled her. That was where there was death. Among the skeletons of the houses were shreds of human flesh. She had barely enough time to recognize her father’s head when there was another great explosion, and she was again buried by debris.
At first she wondered whether she shouldn’t stay there, sheltered in her earth tomb. At least there’s more security here, and fewer horrors. Then, little by little, she started to suffocate. She dug toward the noise, terrified of what she would find this time. She needn’t have worried. The moment she emerged she was buried again.
"I don’t know how long it lasted. I dug and I dug, and each time I made it to the surface I was buried by another explosion. I don’t know why I crawled upward and yet I did, again and again, because the instinct was stronger than I was. I knew that my father was dead and that my house was gone. I didn’t know what had happened to my mother and my brothers. When the bombing finally stopped, I was so surprised that I was still alive. Clearing away debris, we came upon the bodies, whole or in pieces, of those missing. My mother and my brothers were among them. I was jealous of my sister, who had been hit by a train two years earlier, because she had escaped this nightmare.”
Nishio-san told such wonderful stories. They always ended with body parts.
BECAUSE I WAS BECOMING SO DEMANDING of Nishio-san, my parents decided to hire a second Japanese nanny to help her. They placed an announcement in the village.
Only one person applied for the job.
Thus Kashima-san became my second nanny. Kashima-san was the opposite of Nishio-san, who was young and gentle and sweet. Nishio-san was not pretty and came from poverty. Kashima-san was around
fifty and her beauty was as aristocratic as her background. She belonged to that ancient Japanese nobility the Americans abolished in 1945. For nearly thirty years, she had been a princess, and then one day she found herself without a title and without money.
Since then, she had survived by doing various tasks, such as the one my parents hired her to do. She blamed all white people for her poverty and hated every one of us, without exception. Her perfect manners and elegant aspect inspired respect. My parents spoke to her with all the deference due a very great lady; she did not speak to them in return, and did the least amount of work possible. When my mother asked her to help with some task, Kashima-san sighed and gave her a look that signified, “Whom do you take me for?"
Kashima-san treated Nishio-san like a dog, not only because the younger woman came from a humble background, but also because Kashima-san thought she was a traitor who was trafficking with the enemy. She let Nishio-san do all the work. The latter felt a misguided but unswerving sense of obedience toward the older woman, who insulted her at the slightest cause.
"Can’t you hear how you speak to them?"
"I speak to them the way they speak to me.”
"You lack any sense of honor. Is it not enough how they humiliated us in nineteen forty-five?"
"It was not them.”
"They are all the same. These people were allies of the Americans.”
"They were young children during the war. Like I was.”
"So what? Their parents were our enemies. Leopards don’t change their spots. I despise them all.”
"You must not say such things in front of the child,” said Nishio-san, indicating me.
"This baby?"
"She understands what you’re saying.”
"So much the better.”
"I love her.”
She was speaking the truth. Nishio-san loved me as much as she loved her own daughters, ten-year-old identical twins whom she never called by their first names, because she couldn’t tell one from the other. She always called them futago, and for a long time I believed that this was the name of just one child (indications of plurality in Japanese are often very vague). One day the girls came to our house and Nishio-san called to them from afar. Futago! They came running like Siamese cats, thus revealing to me the meaning of the word. Being a twin must be a more serious problem in Japan than elsewhere.