Emmanuel Carrère, L’adversaire (2000)

‘’In those days I didn't lie, but I never shared my true emotions, except to my dog... I was always smiling and I believe that my parents never suspected that I was sad... I had nothing else to hide then, but I was hiding this: my anguish, my sadness... Maybe they would have been ready to listen to me, like Florence after all, and yet I have never managed to speak... And when you get stuck in this mechanism, so as not to disappoint, the first lie leads to the second, and then you carry on your whole life.’’ – L’Adversaire (2002)

Jean-Claude Romand: a serious man, esteemed, worthy of absolute trust. Believed to be a good husband, a warm father, and a highly prestigious doctor. In short, a calm, apparently normal man. Yet it appears that normality sometimes overwhelms, sucking in everything around it, being capable of submerging the very things on which it had been nourished shortly before, every single part from which it was composed.  On January 9, 1993, Jean-Claude murdered his wife and two children, then went to his parents and shot them with a rifle. He also killed their dog. 

Nothing remains of the Romand family; everything was destroyed that January evening; not even Jean-Claude was saved from his fury, or at least the Jean-Claude that had gradually formed with one lie after another—a carefully cultivated persona that emerged after eighteen years of lies. On the whole, he never graduated, worked, and lived on the money that relatives and friends had entrusted to him to invest profitably in a solid French bank, which never took place. When the money ran out and the deception was about to be discovered, rather than revealing the truth to his loved ones, he preferred to kill them. As a Member of the Faculty of Medicine, he had not shown up for the admission exam for the third year — an easily remediable mistake. But to his father and his mother, companions, and Florence, who he would later marry, he lied, saying that he had passed it, that everything had gone well. 

Like a snowball rolling downhill, turning into an avalanche and overwhelming everything in its path, Romand started from a simple, repairable secret that became imposing, and grandiose, and ended up even overwhelming himself 18 years later in an apartment in the French countryside, submerging him and his family. Submerging him and everything he had become over time. Yet, his secret hid nothing. Under the false Doctor Romand, there was no real Jean-Claude Romand. There was nothingness, a nothingness built year after year, fed by anguish and sadness, a nothingness nourished by the perennial desire not to disappoint, by the ambition to be someone else, someone who didn't need to hide behind a white coat and a pair of sunglasses, one like many and at the same time like no one. 

In the end, maybe we are all a bit Jean-Claude Romand with all our fragility. If it were such a simple thing to live, if it were so simple to be in the world, to start a family, to find a job, to wake up every morning and smile at the faint light that makes its way through the tiny cracks in the roller shutter, we would certainly be men without any secrets. Or rather, we could not enjoy the privilege of having any. That very subtle balance created by what we hide would be missing, that precarious stability that most reveals who we are. It is not easy to define ourselves: who we are, what we pursue, who we would like to be, who we will be. Among the many masks we wear, among the many secrets we inhabit, so similar to our way of being, it becomes a very difficult task to discern what is a mask from what is not. I have the feeling that without the masks, there would be absolutely nothing left of us. Because we are all behind the masks together, at the same time, and behind the masks, we hide the black hole of nothingness. The same nothingness of Romand made of ambition and fear motivated by the feelings of dizziness and emptiness in our stomach. Ultimately nothingness is what tells us best because it translates in the same way what is not yet life, and what has ceased to be. If this is the case, what distinguishes us is the ability to know or recognize ourselves.