...of testimony

I had already said that I hadn't seen her again since the suicide of her father... a little more than a year.

And yet she had preserved a great deal of affection for me. She hoped I was going to carry on with my brilliant work. It's what she said, at the time of the hearings. So, why hadn't I seen her again?

I had no desire to answer. If I had answered, I would have been able to say only: because she didn't want to, because she had needed me for that exact moment, not afterwards. And that she had other dreams. Sometimes things don't work out. I must have made a little bit of a sad face admitting that. I wanted to look sad, in case she might see me live on TV and grow sad too. But trials aren't systematically filmed. When they are, they aren't broadcast live. So I couldn't speak to her this way... but let be understood that I still felt a great longing to be with her, if that had been her wish. Unfortunately, in her eyes, my image had been contaminated by the horrors of Mountain R, horrors that I had at least caught a glimpse of. I hadn't even known how to write that novel, as I wouldn't write the one on Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Definitely, she would see me as desperate! I was beginning to doubt that I could publish other books... The fact that I had told her so little of the drama in which her father had played such a sinister role had obviously destroyed my chances. Stupidly enough, I had scored against my own team. This damned propensity for silence... I can't do anything about it. Upon her return to Boston, and her begrudging kiss at the airport, I felt all of a sudden that I was becoming her father's double, a nasty feeling that made my stomach drop, like when a ship yaws in a heavy sea. I felt as if I didn't exist. As for him, even if he hadn't yet committed suicide, it was nonetheless clear that he had been shrunken, as if by headhunters, and that in the general inventory of humanity there was suddenly lack in an item, gone without trace, something that was neither precisely me nor Muratore, but half of each... She had begun to ask me, in turn, questions that were difficult and insistent - but not aggressive - concerning the white-washing of my record that I hoped would result from my trip to the Pole... She let me see how little she cared for such a prospect.

It was necessary to ask me why I was suddenly so pale.

I passed my hand over my face and rubbed my eyes.

[Mountain R, Jouet, J.]