Adam Haberberg Read Online Free PDF Page A

Marie-Thérèse turns right. They proceed down the Avenue d'Italie. Adam stares at the signs as if he were passing through a foreign city. The word
Naturalia
strikes him. Marie-Thérèsedrives the Jeep in silence—it's clear she likes driving her Jeep—then she says, what have you failed? She turns a distressed face toward him. In the distance Adam becomes aware of the Charléty Stadium in a misty glow. Marie-Thérèse pushes buttons. Adam accepts the fog. There we were, walking along that street in the Suresnes district and Alice Canella stopped and said to me, you're my best friend, Adam. I'd have given her, if she'd wanted it, my time, my dreams, my life. She wanted nothing, you're my best friend, Adam, she said. What have you failed? asks Marie-Thérèse. And he hears himself replying, maybe nothing that was worth the trouble.
    “What a strange way to talk. We're still young,” says Marie-Thérèse.
    “I don't think so.”
    “We're not even fifty.”
    It's imperative, thinks Adam, to leap out and escape into the traffic. Instead of which he extracts a little notebook from his pocket and records Marie-Thérèse's remark with the Gustav Klimt ballpoint. Then he says, where do the zoo animals go at night? Do they take them in?
    “Why should they? They stay outside in their natural state.”
    “They're not in their natural state.”
    He again pictures that solitary animal from the forests of Asia in its pathetic enclosure, feeling an affinity for this dejected creature. With a bit of luck the mist will have blanketed your pathetic enclosure, the noise of cars along the Quai Saint-Bernard will be like a distant rumble. In the mountains one can rise above the mist, he thinks, in the mountains one climbs high into the clouds and at every step the landscape changes, as do the light and the smells and the weariness and the joy that have no place in time, for they are things outside of time, he thinks, now stationary on the Boulevard Kellermann. I've never written about the mountains. When it comes to the footpaths and trails I love, I'm tongue-tied. So what's this thing about popular fiction series? says Marie-Thérèse.
    “I don't write popular fiction series. It's a friend of mine.”
    “I see.”
    “He's called Jeffrey Lord. He generally writes about ten books a year.”
    “That's a lot.”
    “Yes. That's why I sometimes give him a hand. I write one or two for him.”
    “I see.”
    Adam studies Marie-Thérèse's remark in his notebook again.
We're not even fifty.
He has circled the
We're.
He circles it again. Adam was putting his latest book behind him. In seeking to break all ties with his personal emotions, he told himself—not wanting to succumb to the abject fashion for autobiography— he'd broken all ties with himself. He'd calculated too much, planned too much, given too much thought to literature. A real writer gives no thought to literature. A real writer doesn't give a damn about literature. He'd wanted to make his mark, which is another way of flaunting one's ego in the marketplace. He'd lacked humility, he knew. The result was an account of a mother-son relationship written in the third person from the mother's point of view. Two fatal mistakes as far as he was concerned. And what a mistake, he thinks, to assume Theodore Onfray is motivated by malice. Maybe your only friend, the only one who took the trouble to read you and form his own opinions, the only one to deplore your artificiality and feebleness. Adam had not entirely lied to Marie-Thérèse Lyoc. Goncharki had developed an aversion to Richard Blade, the intergalactic traveler who provided his livelihood. Pressed and harassed, as he put it, by the publisher and unable to deliver a title on schedule, he'd jokingly invited Adam to stand in for him. After two and a half weeks, a record time for a beginner, during which he'd done nothing but remainhunched over his computer, eating dried fruit and energy bars, Adam presented Goncharki with
The Black