“He’s a hero of a novel”

Is it the bareness of his face? We had never noticed that Amélie Nothomb had such devouring eyes. Usually the red diva behind which she hides her lips distracts attention. The nothing. It comes without make-up and without headgear. Just a little scarf gently rustling around the neck – in spite of everything, to wear one of the black attire that is his signature. We see the boy’s suspenders holding his jeans. His eyes take up all the space. Their clarity burns. Burn it. Burns you. The waitress arrives. “A glass of water, please”, orders Amélie Nothomb. It’s not (yet) time for her darling champagne. “Flat or sparkling?” Asks the waitress. “Nature”, answers the writer, who definitely does not want bubbles, not even in her water. Baffled by the word “nature”, the waitress remains frozen in front of the table, her eyebrow questioning. We translate: “Plate.” Our novelist repeats: “Yes, boring.” Hearing him pronounce these two syllables, one wonders if there could be another adjective that would suit him so badly. Probably not. Remember that in his penultimate novel, Thirsty, she thought she was Jesus! For this one, she slips into the mind of her own father, Patrick, a diplomat well known to his readers but who until then kept his secrets …

How does it feel to say “I” in place of your father?
I felt legitimate to say “I” because I was the only one of the three children to look like him. When I was little, people would say when they saw me: “But it’s Patrick.” I got so used to it that when I was 3 years old, when I met someone, I said without delay and with deep annoyance: “Yes, I know, it’s Patrick.” At the time it annoyed me, I wanted to tell them: “I am me; why can’t you see that I am me?” Today I did the opposite: “Yes, I am Patrick!” [Son rire survient ; c’est comme un lâcher. Un lâcher de soi. Elle a le rire des gens de bonne famille faisant profession de fantasquerie - un rire qui rappelle celui de Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet.] I couldn’t have used the first person singular for just anyone.

“

As he had just died, I wanted to explore the story of my father and death, since his birth

“

You did this for Jesus!
My father would have been supremely happy if I used this process for just two characters, Jesus and him. He had esteem for Jesus, it was he who had told me about him at the beginning, it was he who had made the introductions. [Re-rire, le même exactement.] What interested me was how it felt to be my father. And since he had just died, I wanted to explore the story of my father and death, since his birth. To try to better understand his final death, which was quite commonplace, since he died of illness at home. Her first date with death was that firing squad when I was not born. Perhaps my parents would have been left with two children without my father’s hostage experience. I really feel like I was born from the tremendous desire for life that followed this deliverance. I think that explains a lot of things about me, my obsession with death but also my vitality.

Read also – Amélie Nothomb: “On Sundays, I pass the broom while listening to metal”

You open the book with this firing squad scene. Your father was then 28 years old, he was Belgian consul in Stanleyville, Congo, during the hostage-taking of 1964. “The twelve men are targeting me. Do I see my life parading before me?” , write to you. You do not answer this question, but you are embarking on the story of the twenty-eight years leading up to your conception.
He played the Scheherazade for four months [le temps qu’a duré la prise d’otages], saving his life and that of hundreds of people. What is very beautiful in the story of my father: how this delicate, mannered, almost feminine boy, who fainted at the sight of blood, became a true hero. [La serveuse revient avec l’eau, Amélie Nothomb en boit quelques gorgées.] See, if I had been my father, I would have drunk the glass dry.

Did he do this with everything?
Yes. [De nouveau le rire se lâche.] He was introduced to death early: an orphan practically at birth – he was 8 months old when his father died in a demining accident; her mother, haunted by the death of her husband, entrusts the education to her own parents; at the age of 6 he discovered the Pont d’Oye, the Ardennes castle where he saw the children of his paternal grandfather, Pierre Nothomb, literally starve. Because this man was stealing their food.

We feel that you have a grudge against him …
When it happened to me during dad’s lifetime to say that I had a poet great-grandfather who was a character full of ranting and very criticism, I was entitled to a soap from my father, who read all the articles about me. The next day’s phone call – because I called him every day, a Japanese phone call, very brief – didn’t last a minute and a half, but ten.

What did you answer?
Nothing. I knew it was no use. Dad idolized him. When he spoke of him, it was worship.

Is that why you waited for your father’s death to spell this great-grandfather?
Yes. Especially since I don’t have the impression of being very mean to this character.

“

It was important for me to try to write a book that dad could have liked

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You are only mean in the ellipse …
The ellipse is a good method: we do not censor ourselves, we say everything, but in a way that can pass. Pierre Nothomb had extremely questionable aspects, more serious than those I have mentioned; in the ellipse you can feel them… It was important for me to try to write a book that dad might have liked. I think he would have criticized a little what I wrote about Pierre Nothomb, but I’m sure he would have drunk whey on the rest. He would have loved to be the hero of his daughter’s book. In addition, it was the page of his life of which he was most proud: to have been the negotiator during this hostage-taking. My father is a hero of a novel.

Strictly speaking, now! What did you romanticize? Transvestite?
There is no disguise, but there are a lot of unknowns, because I don’t know everything. It might seem weird because he had a mundane job, he was an ambassador to the tips of his nails, he put people at ease with grace, but with his family, especially his inner circle, he was shy. He loved us but he spoke little to us, he was intimidated in our presence, from time to time he would say to us: “I like being your father but I don’t know what a father is”. He was obsessed with his own father. That’s how I explained to myself the embarrassment he had with his three children. It was not easy to get him to talk. What I didn’t know, I imagined.

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You bring to light in him a sense of literature and aesthetics drawn from his association with death. The fascination he had, and which you restore, for this quatrain of Drunken Boat where it is about “the flache” (the pool of water erected in Ardennes by Rimbaldian mythology) and “a crouching child full of sadness”, did you imagine it?
I knew he knew by heart The drunken Boat, and in particular this quatrain. I imagined all that it could cover as imaginary for him, the wane. I never asked him to. Every summer I go to Pont d’Oye for three weeks, and a week between Christmas and New Years. I have a very strong bond with this place that I discovered when I was 17 years old. I can feel something intense there. There is the wane. It also speaks to me. And then my father is buried near the castle. As he died at the start of confinement, I was only able to visit his grave at the end of July. During all these months of waiting, I had often had the fantasy of lying face down on her grave. When I was able to go, I did. After all, no one on the right, no one on the left, small village cemetery, no one sees me, go ahead. And there it was absolutely grandiose. The encounter. We are in the pure and simple irrational. But he had been waiting for me. I felt his soul rising and coming to meet mine. You think of it what you want. I stay like that for a quarter of an hour, my face on the grave, my arms outstretched. [Elle mime.] Then the holidays end, I come back to Paris, I have a book coming out, all that. I still miss him. What to do? “Bring it back to life.” I’m like, “Be your dad. After all, since ‘I’m Patrick’, hey, really be.” [Cette fois le rire ne repart pas, elle ne s’échappe pas dans le rire, elle reste avec nous et continue de nous expliquer comment elle se parle à elle-même.] “Tell us what it is like to be Patrick and meet death.”

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It’s like he hasn’t reached his great rest until I wrote this book

“

How did this writing go?
It was amazing. I would have been particularly ashamed to miss this book. Among the hundred manuscripts that I have written, for only thirty published, there are bound to be books which I consider to be failed. If I had missed my dad, I would have been sorry. When I wrote, I carried my father, it was quite mythological: Aeneas fleeing Troy in flames carrying his father. I was like, “What a responsibility, he’s dead and I’m carrying him.” Here again, we are completely irrational; but now that this manuscript exists, my father is silent. In the correct meaning of the term. Since his death, I have had a lot of conversations with him in my head. Now I can’t hear it anymore. We can hope that death will be a great rest. It was as if he hadn’t reached his great rest until I had written this book. I finished it this winter, between Christmas and New Years. I was in daddy’s office at the castle. You will think again that you are dealing with a nutcase: the light started to flash, I said: “Yes dad, it’s me, it’s Amélie, your daughter, I’m sitting in your office, j ‘write a book about yourself, do you like it? ” The light has stopped flashing. He was there.

You don’t say a word about any of this in the novel. You caress the emotion without ever giving in to it.
There would have been a way to make a painstaking book on him. But he would not have supported. He was a smiling man who was loath to admit that he had been through difficult things. The only tragic word I heard him say was the last weekend I saw him in Brussels, he was very sick and very weak: “Never get old.”

Your father spoke little. Is it you who put the words in the family?
Telling legends is my role in the family. Pierre Nothomb used words that were a little strange and bombastic.

Is the sobriety of your writing also a way of going against it?
I’d rather not say enough than risk too much.

Your book is almost too short … Did you want to leave us hungry?
[Elle ne répond pas, on sent que ça lui va bien. C’est comme sa façon de prendre congé : quand on arrête l’enregistrement, on pense avoir le temps de faire quelques phrases gratuites, mais déjà elle se lève, une poignée de secondes plus tard elle est partie. Amélie Nothomb tient à savoir couper court. Très court.]

First blood, by Amélie Nothomb. Albin Michel. 180 pages, 17.90 euros, in booksellers on Thursday.

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