Enough About Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

nodding.
    “Biosis. Like biology.”
    Victory by default.
    Sometimes the game requires judgment. At a barber’s in Rennes, he once said he was a museum curator, adding, “At the Space Museum.”
    “Really? The Space Museum? I don’t believe it,” said the customer next to him. “That’s fantastic.”
    Unlucky: the guy turned out to be an amateur astronomer who had been subscribing to
Air and Cosmos
magazine “from the age of twelve,” and all through his childhood—he admitted with child-in-a-candy-store enthusiasm—he built models of space shuttles, space capsules, and launchers: “My favorites were the Soyuz-U, they were the real McCoy.” He has the best one in his living room. It is on a scale of one to twenty-four but still measures seven feet; he used a candle to reproduce the fuel burns on the propulsion nozzles.
    “It pisses my wife off but the kids love it.”
    Yves lets him talk, knowing from experience this is an infallible tactic: the first thing an amateur meeting a specialist wants to do is display his knowledge, be sent off with flying colors. This man, Yves realizes instinctively, knows a lot more than he does on the subject. So he cautiously restricts the conversation to a subject he has mastered, claiming there is an upcoming exhibition: the life of Werner von Braun, the ex-Nazi scientistwho ran NASA during the space race. He mentions the CIA’s Operation Paperback, in which they exfiltrated war criminals to serve the needs of the Cold War, and talks about the Dora work camp where von Braun was a particularly zealous
Obersturmführer
. Yves never hesitates, confidently coining the names of “that crook” von Braun’s collaborators: Gustav Jung and Friedrich Hofmannsthal. The surnames may be fakes, borrowed from other fields, but all the anecdotes Yves relates are real: that is his elegance as a liar. He holds out like this for ten minutes, easily. Yves is grateful for having short straight hair, the barber has already finished cutting it.
    “Perhaps I could come and see you at the museum?” asks the
Air and Cosmos
subscriber.
    Yves feels awkward, crestfallen, as he always does when he has to leave the fiction and turn to real deception. Misleading such a charming man ruins the pleasure of inventing another life for himself. He finds an escape route.
    Yves is not a pathological liar. He simply regrets that, in his teens, no single passion swept aside all the others and overtook him completely. He became neither a biologist nor a theologian, astronomer, or historian. Yves is a writer. He makes things up unashamedly partly because admitting what he does to a stranger always results in an intrigued “And what have you written?” inevitably followed by the perennial “Sorry, I haven’t read it.”
    A writer. It took him a long time to call himself one, but he lives with words and ended up living off them, not as comfortably as he would like, but a good deal better than he had suspected. His editors reassure him: “You have readers, but you haven’t yet found your true readership.” Yves is not sure he is the type that has a true readership.
    Yves is a writer because he could not write “infinite tenderness,” “life’s journey,” or “hopelessly in love” without feeling ashamed. From time to time he lets slip a “sleeping heavily,” “quick as a flash,” and “scribbled in haste,” and is very upset when he spots the cliché once the book is published. He often uses superfluous commas too, then exterminates them mercilessly. He has read too much not to know that writing well means writing badly, as someone once said. He wishes every sentence spilled out of him, surprised him, and that the surprise would never lose its sparkle. He reads over his work, exasperated to find mannerisms in his writing; then he erases the seductive ring it had, the elegant turn of phrase, he tracks down the literary pleonasm and destroys the ternary rhythm that comes to him naturally. Sometimes