The Red Notebook

by Antoine Laurain

How many things do we feel obliged to do for the sake of it, or for appearances, or because we are trained to do them, but which weigh us down and don’t in fact achieve anything?

Up until the day he had started to feel, dimly at first, then more and more clearly, that the man he had become was the absolute opposite of what he really was. Although the dichotomy weighed heavily on him, for a while the money he was earning was compensation enough, but then it could no longer make up for it. The gap between his ideal and his reality was too great. The weight turned into an anguish which was succeeded by the intolerable idea that he was wasting his life – or even that he had already wasted it.

The pair had enjoyed a philosophical discussion of a rare intensity, spanning such universal themes as death, the afterlife, the possibility of life on other planets and the existence of God.

the holy man received Christ’s stigmata, but he also possessed the gift of ubiquity, or ‘bilocation’, as the documentary put it. Padre Pio was said to have been in several places at the same time, and these places were many thousands of kilometres apart. There were eyewitness accounts to back this up. Despite having kept quiet initially, the Church took the unexpected step of declaring the claims to be genuine.

Do great things, Laure, be happy, or at least do your best to be. Life is fragile; you’ve found that out for yourself.’

reality did not truly exist, it was formed on our retina from a mixture of emptiness and atoms. ‘It exists and at the same time it doesn’t exist,’

But it wasn’t the title that he had heard but an actual question, ‘Are you nostalgic for what could have been?’ posed by a stranger. A question he had answered truthfully: ‘Yes.’

Can you experience nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened? We talk of ‘regrets’ about the course of our lives, when we are almost certain we have taken the wrong decision; but one can also be enveloped in a sweet and mysterious euphoria, a sort of nostalgia for what might have been.

we can pass right by something very important: love, a job, moving to another city or another country. Or another life. ‘Pass by’ and at the same time be ‘so close’ that sometimes, while in that state of melancholy that is akin to hypnosis, we can, in spite of everything, manage to grab little fragments of what might have been. Like catching snatches of a far-off radio frequency. The message is obscure, yet by listening carefully you can still catch snippets of the soundtrack of the life that never was. You hear sentences that were never actually said, you hear footsteps echoing in places you’ve never been to, you can make out the surf on a beach whose sand you have never touched. You hear the laughter and loving words of a woman though nothing ever happened between you. The idea of an affair with her had crossed your mind. Perhaps she would have liked that – probably in fact – but nothing ever happened. For some unknown reason, we never gave in to the exquisite vertigo that you feel when you move those few centimetres towards the face of the other for the first kiss. We passed by, we passed so close that something of the experience remains.

As soon as she stepped inside the door, she was hit by that feeling of coming home after a long time away, when the dust seems to have been blown off things you had become so used to looking at you had stopped seeing them. Everything suddenly seems more intense, like a photograph restored to its original colour and contrast.

‘There are mysterious beings, always the same, who watch over us at each crossroads in our lives.’ Let’s just say that, unintentionally, I have been one of those beings.

I like the way this man has slipped away without leaving an address. I like his letter. I like the fact that he works in a bookshop. I’m scared he might be a bit nuts. I’m scared I’ll never meet him. I find the idea of a stranger coming into my flat terrifying, but I like the idea that Belphégor wasn’t scared of him. Which proves the man is not terrifying (paradox). I like the idea of a man going to so much trouble to find me (no one has ever gone to so much trouble for me before).

He must be slightly crazy. Or very romantic. Or have too much time on his hands. Or a bit of all three,

now there was a man in the city who knew almost all there was to know about her. A man whom she had never met yet who was familiar with the decor of her home, had studied her belongings at leisure and stroked her cat, knew exactly what was inside her bag, what she liked to read, what her bedroom looked like.

haven’t kept a diary since I was seventeen. I think it was soon after my baccalauréat that I gave it up for reasons I’m not sure of, because from the age of twelve or thirteen I had written one religiously. (Note to self: Look for my diaries in the boxes in the cellar.) I remember sticking all kinds of things in them: tickets from films and plays I had been to see, leaves I had picked up on walks and bills for meals I had eaten on café terraces. They were a record of what I had done when, down to the nearest minute. I think I held on to them as ‘evidence’ of some kind. They helped me to find my place in the world and, in a broader sense, to prove to myself that I really existed. I suppose I must have decided at some point that I no longer needed to do that, because I gave up writing a diary, stopped telling the story of my life and tried to just live it instead.

shaking her head very slowly without saying a word. I liked the fact she held my gaze; normally when I tell people, they look away and then turn back with sympathy in their eyes, and I feel like giving them a slap.