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  “It’s for your own good, my darling. I’m worried about your bulimia.”

  “Bulimia!”

  Plectrude stared at her father, then at her sisters. “You’re all too cowardly to defend me!”

  Her father stammered, “No, I … It doesn’t bother me if you’ve got a good appetite.”

  “You’re such a coward!” cried the girl. “I eat less than you do.”

  Nicole shrugged her shoulders.

  “I couldn’t care less.”

  “Oh, you’re such a caring sister!” screeched Plectrude.

  Béatrice took a deep breath. “Okay, Mama. Maybe you can leave my sister in peace, all right?”

  “Thank you,” said Plectrude.

  Clémence smiled. “She’s not your sister, Béatrice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you think this is the right moment?” murmured Denis.

  Clémence got up and went to get a photograph, which she threw on the table.

  “This is Lucette, my sister, Plectrude’s real mother.”

  As she told Nicole and Béatrice the story, Plectrude grabbed the photograph and stared at the dead woman’s pretty face.

  The sisters were flabbergasted.

  “I look like her,” said Plectrude.

  She remembered that Lucette had committed suicide at the age of nineteen, and realized that that would be her fate, too. I’m sixteen. Another three years to live, and a child to bring into the world.

  * * *

  FROM THAT MOMENT ONWARD Plectrude looked at all the many boys who buzzed around her with different eyes. She couldn’t stare at one without thinking, Would I like to have his baby?

  More often than not, the answer was no. The idea of having a child with one of these preening young men seemed unthinkable to her.

  In her drama classes, the teacher decided that Plectrude and one of her fellow students would perform a scene from Eugène lonesco’s The Bald Soprano. The girl was so taken by the play that she got hold of Ionesco’s complete works. She suddenly discovered that rage to read that keeps you up for whole nights at a time.

  She had tried to read before, but the books always fell from her hands. It may be that within the universe of the written word is a work that will turn each person into a reader, should fate allow that to happen. What Plato says about the loving half—that other part of us floating around somewhere, and which must be found if we are not to remain incomplete until our dying day—is even more true where books are concerned.

  Ionesco is my author, Plectrude thought. This gave her considerable happiness, the kind of intoxication that can only come from discovering a book that you love.

  For some people, that first literary passion leads to a love of reading. This was not the case with our heroine, who only looked at other books to confirm how boring they were. She decided she wouldn’t read anyone else’s words, and prided herself on her loyalty.

  One evening, when she was watching television, Plectrude saw some footage of the French chanteuse Catherine Ringer. Listening to her sing, Plectrude felt a mixture of infatuation and bitterness: infatuation because she thought Ringer’s voice was amazing; bitterness because she would have liked to sing like that herself, but she had no way of learning how.

  Had she been the kind of girl who had a different dream every week, it wouldn’t have mattered so much. But this was not the case. Plectrude didn’t go through crazes. Her drama classes didn’t thrill her. She would have sold her soul to dance again, but the doctors, though observing a definite progress in her recalcification, were unanimous in forbidding her to return to her old vocation.

  The discovery of Catherine Ringer was a shock because for the first time Plectrude had a dream that had nothing at all to do with ballet.

  She consoled herself with the thought that she was going to die in two years anyway, and that before then she had to bring a child into the world. I don’t have time to be a singer.

  * * *

  ONE OF HER ASSIGNMENTS in her drama classes was to act out a passage from Ionesco’s The Lesson. For an actor, getting one of the main roles in a play by your favorite author is like Byzantium and Cythera, Rome and the Vatican: having your cake and eating it, too.

  It wouldn’t be accurate to say that she became the young pupil in the play, for she had always been that girl—so passionate about what she apprenticed herself to that she destroyed whatever it was—aided and abetted by a teacher who chews up knowledge and students.

  She endowed her role with such a sense of the sacred that it infected the other role. It was left up to her as to who would play the part of the teacher.

  During a rehearsal, in response to a line miraculous in its truthfulness (“Philology leads to crime”), she told him that she wanted him to be the father of her child. He thought this was perfectly in keeping with the spirit of Ionesco and agreed. That night, she took him at his word.

  A month later, Plectrude knew that she was pregnant: a warning to anyone who still sees Ionesco only as a comic writer.

  * * *

  PLECTRUDE WAS THE SAME age as her mother had been when she gave birth. The baby was called Simon. He was beautiful and healthy.

  She felt a fabulous surge of love when she saw him. She hadn’t expected that she would have such a strong maternal instinct, and she was sorry about it. “Suicide’s not going to be easy.”

  She was nonetheless determined to take things to their conclusion. I’ve already made concessions to fate by deciding not to kill Simon’s father. But I’m not going to get myself out of it.

  She rocked the child, murmuring, “I love you, Simon, I love you. I’ll die because I must. If I could choose, I would stay near you. But I must die. It’s an order, I can feel it.”

  A week later, she said to herself, It’s now or never. If I go on living, I’m going to get too attached to Simon. The longer I wait, the harder it’s going to be.

  She didn’t write a letter, for the simple reason that she didn’t like writing. What she was about to do didn’t require further explanation.

  Feeling her resolve weaken, she decided to put on her finest clothes. She had noted that elegance tended to inspire. Two years previously, at a flea market, she had found a dress that looked as if it had once belonged to some grand duchess. It was midnight blue with old lace, so sumptuous that it was almost unwearable.

  If I don’t wear it today, I’ll never wear it, she reflected, before bursting out laughing as she realized how profoundly true that was.

  Pregnancy had left her a little thinner, and she floated in her dress, but she made the best of it. She let down her magnificent hair, which fell to the small of her back. She made herself up to look like a tragic fairy. She was pleased, telling herself that now she could kill herself without shame.

  * * *

  PLECTRUDE KISSED SIMON. The moment she left her apartment she wondered how she was going to do it. Throw herself under a train, in front of a car, or into the Seine? I’ll just see, she concluded. If you worried about that sort of detail you’d never do anything.

  She walked to the nearest station, but didn’t have the courage to throw herself under the wheels of the suburban line. Where dying’s concerned, it would be best to do it in the middle of the city, and in the least awful way, she said to herself, with a certain sense of propriety. So she got on the train. No one could ever remember having seen a passenger like Plectrude, who was smiling beatifically. The prospect of suicide put her in an excellent mood.

  She went into the center of the city and walked along the Seine, in search of the bridge best suited to her undertaking. She couldn’t make her mind up between the Pont Alexandre III, the Pont des Arts, and the Pont-Neuf, so she walked around for a long time, going over their respective merits in her mind.

  In the end she decided the Pont Alexandre III was too magnificent, and the Pont des Arts too intimate. The Pont-Neuf seduced her because it was both old and had semicircular platforms, ideally suited for last-minut
e changes of mind.

  People turned their heads at the sight of this beautiful woman. She was too absorbed in her project to notice. Never since childhood had Plectrude felt so euphoric.

  She sat down on the edge of the bridge, her feet dangling over the void. Many people sat like this, and it didn’t attract attention. She looked around her. A gray sky hung over Notre Dame, the surface of the Seine rippled in the wind. Suddenly Plectrude was struck by the great age of the world. How quickly her nineteen years would be swallowed up in the centuries of Paris!

  She felt dizzy, and her exaltation subsided. The grandeur of durable things, the eternity that she wouldn’t be a part of! She had brought a child into the world who wouldn’t remember her. Apart from that, nothing. The only person she had loved was her mother and by killing herself, she would be obeying the mother she no longer loved. That’s not true. There’s Simon as well. I love him. But given how destructive a mother’s love is, it would be better if I spared him that.

  Below her legs, the river beckoned.

  Why have I waited for this moment to feel what it is that I lack? My life has been racked with hunger and thirst. Nothing’s ever nourished me—my heart has dried up, my mind is starving, and I’ve got a gaping hole where my soul should be. Is this how I’ll die?

  The void roared around her. The question crushed her. She was tempted to escape it by letting her feet become heavier than her brain.

  At that very moment came a voice, a distant yell. “Plectrude!”

  Is that a voice from among the living or the dead? she wondered.

  She leaned toward the water, as though she would see someone in it.

  The shout doubled in intensity. “Plectrude!”

  A man’s voice.

  She turned toward where it was coming from.

  * * *

  THAT DAY, MATHIEU SALADIN had felt an inexplicable need to walk along the Seine.

  He was making the best of the mild, gray day, when he saw an apparition approaching him: a girl of dazzling beauty dressed for a ball.

  He stopped to watch her pass. She didn’t see him. She didn’t see anyone, with her big, astounding eyes. Then he recognized her. He smiled with joy: I’ve found her! This time I’m not going to let her go.

  He followed her and felt that pleasure that comes from secretly following someone you know, observing their behavior, interpreting their actions.

  She turned onto the Pont-Neuf. He knew its reputation as a bridge for suicides, but he wasn’t worried. She didn’t look desperate. He rested his elbows on the railing along the Seine and leaned forward to watch his former classmate.

  Gradually it occurred to him that Plectrude was behaving very oddly. Her joyful look struck him as suspicious. He knew suddenly that she was going to throw herself in the river. He yelled her name and ran toward her.

  * * *

  SHE RECOGNIZED HIM immediately.

  “Are you with anybody?” asked Mathieu, not wasting a second.

  “Single, with a baby,” she replied, just as crisply.

  “Perfect. Want me?”

  “Yes.”

  He gripped Plectrude’s hips and swung them around one hundred and eighty degrees so that her feet weren’t dangling over the void. They tongue-wrestled for a moment to seal what had been said.

  “You weren’t going to kill yourself, by any chance?”

  “No,” she replied, out of modesty.

  He locked lips with her again. She thought, A minute ago I was about to throw myself into the void, and now I’m in the arms of the man of my life, a man I haven’t seen for seven years, whom I thought I’d never see again. I’ll put off my death until later.

  * * *

  PLECTRUDE DISCOVERED A SURPRISING thing: you could be happy once you’d reached adulthood.

  “I’m going to show you where I live,” Mathieu Saladin said.

  “You don’t waste any time!”

  “I’ve wasted seven years. That’s enough.”

  If Mathieu Saladin had had any idea what this admission would unleash upon him, he’d have kept his trap shut. Over and over, Plectrude shouted at him, “You made me wait seven years! You made me suffer!”

  To which Mathieu protested, “You left me, too, you know! Why didn’t you tell me you loved me when we were twelve?”

  “The boy’s supposed to do that,” Plectrude said bossily.

  One day, when Plectrude was launching off on the familiar refrain, “You made me wait seven years!” Mathieu told her something new.

  “You’re not the only one who’s been in a hospital. Between the age of twelve and eighteen I was hospitalized six times.”

  “What? Is this some new excuse? And for what trivial ailment, pray, were you being treated?”

  “To be more precise, between the age of one and eighteen I was hospitalized eighteen times.”

  She frowned.

  “It’s a long story,” he began.

  * * *

  AT THE AGE OF one, Mathieu Saladin had died.

  Baby Mathieu Saladin was crawling around his parents’ living room, exploring the exciting universe of the feet of armchairs and the undersides of tables. An extension cord plugged into an electrical socket caught his attention. The baby followed the cord to its end—a captivating plastic bulb. He put it in his mouth and salivated. He received a shock that killed him.

  Mathieu’s father immediately drove the baby to the hospital, where the best doctor in the world brought the little body back to life.

  But he still had to be given a mouth. Mathieu Saladin no longer had anything that might have merited the name: no lips, no palate. The doctor sent him to the best surgeon in the universe, who took a little bit of cartilage here, a bit of skin there, and, at the end of his painstaking patchwork, reconstructed, if not a mouth, at least the resemblance of one.

  “That’s all I can do for now,” he concluded. “Come back in a year.”

  Every year he performed a new operation on Mathieu Saladin. And every year he said goodbye with the same two sentences. This ritual became a family joke.

  Plectrude listened to him with rapt attention.

  “That’s why you’ve got that sublime scar on your moustache?”

  “Sublime?”

  “There’s nothing more beautiful!”

  These two creatures were destined for each other. During their first year of life, each had come far too close to death.

  * * *

  A FEW YEARS PASSED. Experiencing perfect love with Mathieu Saladin, a musician, had given Plectrude the courage to become a singer, under the pseudonym “Robert.” The name of a popular French dictionary, it was ideally suited to the encyclopedic dimensions of her suffering.

  In most cases the greatest misfortunes assume the face of friendship: Plectrude met Amélie Nothomb and saw in her the friend, the sister that she so needed.

  Plectrude told her about her life. Amélie listened with alarm to this tragic tale. She asked Plectrude if so many attempts to murder her hadn’t given her the desire to kill.

  “Your father was murdered by your mother when she was eight months pregnant with you. We’re sure that you were awake, because you had the hiccups. So you’re a witness!”

  “But I didn’t see anything!”

  “You must have been aware of something. You’re a very special kind of witness: a witness in utero. They say that babies in their mothers’ bellies hear music and know when their parents are making love. Your mother emptied a gun into your father: you must have felt it, one way or another.”

  “Where are we going with this, exactly?”

  “You’re saturated with that murder. Let’s not even talk about the metaphorical attempted murders of you, and those you’ve committed against yourself. How could you not have become a murderess?”

  Plectrude, who would never have thought of that, could think of nothing else afterwards. She satisfied her murderous impulse upon the very person who had suggested it. She took a rifle and fired it at Amélie’s t
emple.

  “It’s the only way I could get her to shut up,” she told her husband curtly.

  Plectrude and Mathieu looked at the corpse with tears in the corners of their eyes. From that point on their life became an Ionesco play: Amélie or How to Get Rid of It.

  Murder and sex are often followed by the same question: what should we do with the body?

  Plectrude and Mathieu still haven’t decided.

  About the Author

  Amelie Nothomb’s novels are international bestsellers. Belgian by birth, she lives in Paris. Her novel Fear and Trembling (Griffin) was made into a successful film in France. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY AMÉLIE NOTHOMB

  Loving Sabotage

  The Stranger Next Door

  Fear and Trembling

  The Character of Rain

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Also by Amélie Nothomb

  Copyright

  THE BOOK OF PROPER NAMES. Copyright © 2002 by Editions Albin Michel, S.A. Translation copyright © 2004 by Shaun Whiteside. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  First published in France under the title Robert des noms propres by Editions Albin Michel, S.A.