“What matters is having the impression that I did,” she answered enigmatically.
At the beginning of 2014, I got wind of an affair so incredible that I refused to believe it: I heard that, several nights a week, in so-called nocturnal circles, Pétronille was performing an act of Russian roulette.
I laughed until I could laugh no more, and thought about calling the performer herself, just in order to apprise her of the rumors going around—“Unto those that have shall more be given,” I would have said—when she called me:
“I can’t make it on Thursday evening.”
“Which Thursday evening? Next Thursday?”
“March 20.”
“But it’s your birthday.”
“I’ve got work.”
“You have work on the evening of your birthday?”
“It can’t be helped.”
“You promised we’d spend the evening together!”
“Don’t insist.”
She hung up. I was in a foul mood. I tried to persuade myself that it was because of one of her strange amorous trysts: “But then why did she have such a sinister tone of voice?” I wondered.
The rumor I’d heard maintained that Pétronille was performing her Russian roulette act in a cellar on the rue Saint-Sabin. Since I now had nothing planned for the evening of March 20, there was nothing to stop me spending it in the cellar in question.
On the appointed day, I arrived at the place at around seven in the evening, dressed like a vivandière from the Holy Grail, which did not set me apart from the other patrons.
“Poor Pétronille, you must really be desperate for cash to agree to work in such a smoky dive!” I thought.
In a waterproof backpack filled with ice cubes I had a bottle of champagne, a Joseph-Perrier blanc de blancs vintage 2002, with a flute in each side pocket. This was an inspired move, because the menu of the Saint-Sabin cellar offered only beer and spiced wine.
There were no posters advertising any Russian roulette numbers—either to avoid problems in the event of a police raid, or because the whole business was just a fabrication, I thought.
The vaulted ceiling must have dated back to the catacombs, the lighting would have been perfect for a clandestine burial, the patrons and waiters were sporting skulls on every finger—everything here was an omen of death. I began to feel more and more uncomfortable.
Then I heard a lovely song that my brain took some time to identify: Roulette, by System of a Down. People reacted to this signal by falling silent. As there was neither a stage nor a podium, it was in front of the bar that I saw Pétronille arrive, and for the first time she seemed tall to me, perhaps because she was the only one standing up. From her jeans pocket she took a revolver and began a long-winded speech in a high-pitched and intelligible voice.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Russian Roulette is a game that never goes out of fashion…”
I had already stopped listening. Bloody hell, so it was true! Fear, pure and simple, quickly gave way to panic, so much so that I was literally petrified.
For the benefit of anyone who did not know the rules, Pétronille opened her weapon, displayed the empty cylinder, placed a single bullet in it, snapped it shut then spun the cylinder, the act which had given the venerable gun its name. To conclude her spiel she said, “Are there any volunteers present?”
The audience burst out laughing. Not I.
“You can only ever count on yourself, as always.”
The song by System of a Down was over.
“And now I will ask you to remain silent.”
She had no trouble obtaining their silence. You could hear the cylinder spinning, or at least you thought you heard it, since everyone was so riveted on what was unfolding before their eyes. Pétronille placed the barrel against her temple and said, “Dostoyevsky, who had been sentenced to death and didn’t know he would be pardoned at the last minute, tells of his experience before the firing squad—the seconds that seemed to last a dizzyingly long time, the insane beauty of the tiniest little thing, his eyes opening at last to see what he must see. Now from my own position, I can confirm that he was right.”
She pressed the trigger. Nothing happened.
I was about to go on my knees to thank Providence when she said, “In westerns they call this thing a six-shooter. So I will shoot it six times. Only five more to go!”
As she began to repeat the operation, I recalled something from very long ago: a video that had been making the rounds about ten years earlier, Russian Roulette Made Easy, or something of that ilk, in which an expert gave instruction in the decisive gesture, the one you had to make to spin the cylinder in order to determine where the bullet would end up. Might Pétronille have learned this technique? I hoped so.
She pressed the trigger. Nothing.
“Only four more,” she declared.
I watched carefully as she spun the cylinder: her gesture was perfect, insofar as you could not detect any deliberate intention. I would not be granted the key to the mystery.
“The barrel knows the way to my temple now,” she said.
She pressed the trigger. Nothing.
“Only three left.”
Even if she had seen that video, the risk Pétronille was taking was nevertheless enormous. Even seasoned prestidigitators could make mistakes, so all the more reason for an adventurer like her to make one.
She pressed the trigger. Nothing.
“Just two more.”
Only Pétronille still maintained her composure. The entire room was in a trance, and me most of all. What we were experiencing and expressing through our heightened silence was of a genre beyond fear, a sort of becalmed climax—time had stood still, every second was divisible unto infinity, we were all Dostoyevsky facing the firing squad, and it was on our temple that we could feel the tip of the gun barrel.
She pressed the trigger. Nothing.
“Only one more.”
A sudden flash of understanding went through me from head to toe: what had made me feel so close to Pétronille right from the start was this very sensation, this intoxication which for lack of a better word we call a love of risk, which does not obey any biological instinct or rational analysis, and which I had illustrated in a less spectacular but no less definitive way in circumstances that are unprintable. We were clearly not in the majority, to be sure, in this golden age of the principle of caution, and we understood each other all the better for it. How could I have ever begun to imagine she might be performing this act for money? And how could she have insisted on the fact that she was testing those drugs for profit? If Pétronille had placed herself—and was placing herself again—in such danger, it was in order to experience the supreme exaltation and ecstatic dilation of feeling truly alive.
She pressed the trigger. Nothing.
As the audience had already begun shouting, she motioned to us to be quiet and said:
“Don’t go thinking I’ve been taking you for a ride.”
And without spinning the barrel, she took aim at a bottle on top of the counter and fired. The shot was so loud that you could hardly hear the glass breaking.
A thundering round of applause. Resplendent, Pétronille came over to the table where I was sitting on my own, and sat down next to me.
“Bravo! You were magnificent!” I was exultant.
“Do you think so?” she said with false modesty.
“And what an original way to celebrate your thirty-ninth birthday! Is it an allusion to Hitchcock’s 39 Steps?”
“Enough chatter. What are we drinking?”
“I have just what we need,” I answered, pulling out a bottle of champagne.
I filled the flutes and raised a toast to her glorious exploit. The first sip enthralled me: nothing improves the taste of champagne like Russian roulette.
“You almost had to drink w
ithout me,” said Pétronille.
“You have given me the opportunity to put one of Napoleon’s mottos into practice: he always had a bottle of champagne on ice, to drink after the battle. ‘If I am victorious, I deserve it, but if I am defeated, I need it,’ he said.”
“And what is your verdict?”
“You deserve it. Happy birthday.”
As usual, I spoke too soon. Late in the night, we quarreled about god knows what, and the alcohol made it seem all the more important. At that point we were walking down the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, and Pétronille, ever an irrepressible personality, slid a bullet into the cylinder and spun it around as she saw fit. She put the barrel against my temple and fired.
“This time, it’s not Marlowe who has departed this life in a street brawl,” she said to my corpse.
She rummaged in my bag, found this manuscript, which she put in her pocket, and threw my body into the Canal Saint-Martin.
The next day was a Friday, a workday. To ease her conscience, Pétronille took the manuscript to my publisher.
“It’s not very long,” she told him. “I’ll stick around, you read it, and then we’ll talk about it.”
In the meantime she settled into my office where, in her typical offhand manner, she made a phone call lasting two and a half hours to Timbuktu.
After that, the publisher came to ask her whether she oughtn’t, rather, take the manuscript to the police.
“I’ll let you be the judge of that,” she replied.
Pétronille dashed off like a cat and vanished onto the roofs of Paris, where I’ll wager she is still prowling about to this day.
As for me, like a well-behaved stiff I have been meditating at the bottom of the canal, and the lessons I have learned from this affair will be of no use. Even though I know that writing is dangerous, and one can risk one’s life in the process, I always fall for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amélie Nothomb was born in Japan of Belgian parents in 1967. She lives in Paris. Since her debut on the French literary scene, she has published a novel a year, every year. Her ebullient fiction, unconventional thinking, and public persona have combined to transform her into a worldwide literary sensation. Her books have been translated into over twenty-five languages and been awarded numerous prizes including the French Academy’s 1999 Grand Prix of the Novel, the René-Fallet prize, the Alain-Fournier prize, and the Grand Prix Giono in 2008.
Amélie Nothomb, Pétronille
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