Here he is in his glass cage, the man who kills happy old women, with atropine distilled in their water. “Olivier Cappelaere is alone. In the thorny and bitter forest where he plunges, no one can follow him.” He denies having wanted to murder Suzanne to recover more quickly the apartment bought in life annuity. Two years later, Oliver managed to murder Jacqueline of whom he is the universal legatee. He had slipped into the skin of the “godson of the heart”.
It is while reading Nice Morning that one of Jacqueline’s nieces has doubts about Olivier, who will be sentenced to life imprisonment. Olivier who will never manage to free himself from his role as victim and misunderstood. He holds a character in the dock who convinces no one, barely himself, but who gives him something to ruminate on his failures by blaming them on the comfortable back of fate, misunderstandings, and others.
A hypnotic text
This is one of many cases that Yasmina Reza attends and whose details she offers us. Accounts of some facts (to be published on September 4 by Flammarion). A hypnotic text that alternates between trials and scenes from intimate life, a text that sticks to the soul, that works underground, to suddenly resurface in consciousness with a paralyzing force. Time, death, denial, stifled love, and justice with its coldness of the Penal Code, its compulsive need to give meaning to the impossible and the silences, to determine deep and secret motivations, are at the heart of this text to which we return constantly to seek, avidly, to detect a truth, our own truth certainly, to reassure ourselves, in vain, searching between the destinies and choices of others, something to be less frightened by our own demons – dead or alive.
Jack Sion, 66 at the time, is the man who created a seductive 37-year-old character, a prince of young girls to seduce them on dating sites and activate the fantasy machine. It was enough for him and for them. But 24 of them insist on meeting him and he offers them a blind date, at his place. Darkness, blindfold, sexual intercourse, and goodbye. No disappointment possible, we remain at the level of a dream. But two of them will remove the blindfold and discover the scam. They file a complaint for rape. In court, it is upsetting because “they cry not for the defilement, nor the humiliation, they cry for the absence of a miracle.” Just like Brigitte, a worshiper of Tariq Ramadan, who filed a complaint for rape and violence, but who still sent messages of love to the Islamist preacher afterwards: “Brigitte filed a complaint not because of the facts, but because of the missing words, because of the lack of remorse, of explanation, of tenderness. Which court deals with these things?”
And what court deals with the dead? Dead that we only know how to bury with clumsiness, fear, hatred and more rarely grace? Widows who do not survive? Streets that will no longer see this ritual walk? Books that will no longer have dedications? Solitary tributes? Like the heartbreakingly powerful one paid by Marc Weitzmann to his father. A tribute where “he says papa, maman, without hindsight, speaks of a world where children were loved, words that he would no longer dare to produce in real life, I mean unpronounceable in the pitiless theater of the adult Marc Weitzmann”. A tribute that ends in the “disconcerted silence of the audience” when Marc “puts the kippah on his head, and all alone, he pronounces the Kaddish in Aramaic. […] At the end he says Amen. No voice answers.”
After a demoralizing winter dinner, Nicole walks down the stairs and suddenly she sings! And Yasmina Reza, obviously surprised by this gap between the dull evening and the singing, just like that, for no reason, calls out to her. And Nicole replies: “No, no, it’s a mistake! I was just thinking, but why are you singing?” Perhaps it is in this short sequence that lies the key to this book that I can’t put down. We sing by mistake, despite the time that passes inexorably, despite the things that are wrong, despite death, despite the lack of love that is killing us. We sing anyway. So much the better if it’s a mistake.
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