E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten
Bonnefoy Heritage
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-387-6
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-387-6
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Miguel Bonnefoy was born in France in 1986 to a Venezuelan mother and a Chilean father. In 2013, he was awarded the Prix du Jeune Ecrivain, which previously launched the careers of Marie Darrieussecq and others. Octavio's Journey is Bonnefoy's first novel, written in French. It has sold more than 25,000 copies in France and has been awarded the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucauld (for debut novels - past winners include Goncourt winner Mathias Enard), the Prix Fénéon and the Prix de la Vocation, which rewards new talent (past winners include Amélie Nothomb and Joël Dicker). The book was also shortlisted for the Prix des Cinq Continents and the Goncourt First Novel Award.
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Thérèse
The fall did not kill him. Lazare Lonsonier lay unconscious as he waited for a doctor to arrive from the rear trenches and apply antiseptic, and for three nights, only the convulsions of his chest proved he was still alive. He was given injections of camphor oil, morphine and opium to ease the pain, but nothing worked. One rainy Tuesday, he became the first patient to undergo a lobectomy and, unusually, retained hazy memories and vague sensations of a procedure which would become one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine. He was ill for many weeks and finally awoke with a heavy head and puffy eyelids in a hospital that must once have been a traditional Normandy homestead of three floors and four balconies, whose bedrooms still bore the traces of the happy family they had once housed.
The room in which he found himself must have belonged to the children because the window onto the balcony, painted in the colours of exotic birds, did not open. He saw for the first time all the bandages in which he had been wrapped and the white linen dressing on his left shoulder. When he asked about his brothers, he was told Charles had been bayoneted near Arras, having fought passionately until dawn through a night of fierce fighting. Robert had died the next morning, a rifle in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. He had been charged by a tank, just as the German trench was on the brink of defeat, not far from the very land in which his ancestors had planted their vines. When he heard these two pieces of news, with his sides thickly swaddled, he felt such pain that he began to cough violently and, as he jolted in his bed, knocked his head against the headboard. He fell into another deep, dark coma as if tumbling into a well without a rope or wall to help him out, his body racked with spasms and convulsions, and it was feared he would wake up crazy. Never, in all the years that followed, could Lazare Lonsonier think of the war without reliving the bitter turmoil of those days and, even after he recovered and was granted leave, the lightness that had once graced his heart could never be regained.
During his convalescence, he was given a desk job writing condolence letters to the Spanish-speaking families of fallen soldiers. Sitting at an old typewriter, the first letter he wrote was to his mother. Then, on and on, from one message to the next, he had to tell every desperate sister, every inconsolable wife, every despondent father, the story of the glorious operations in which their son, husband or brother had taken part, finding the right words to underline their courage, daring to place the noblest, most harrowingly poetic last words on their lips. He sent almost a thousand missives, which ended up in a thousand drawers on another continent, sometimes taking six months to arrive, like fragments of memory which mothers stored carefully among cueca scarves and copper tablets, a thousand letters which defied moths and oblivion to be read again by the next generation.
Lazare was soon given access to registers of births, deaths and marriages. Being relatively close to the Jura, he thought he would easily be able to pinpoint among the yellowed records of the municipal archive the only man who, to his knowledge, could still remember the history of the family before it had fled France. He remembered his father talking about an uncle named Michel René, and set about tracking him down. Yet not only were there no Renés, nor Lonsoniers, but he became lost in an incomprehensible jungle of complex family trees and gave up after several weeks of dogged searching, having come to the conclusion that all that remained in these arcane texts were paper corpses and anonymous ghosts. Thus of the four years of war, Lazare Lonsonier spent one in the trenches, two in hospital, and the last in an office in the town hall.
On 11 November 1918, the bells of every church in France pealed to herald the end of the war. In December, when Lazare was sent, along with hundreds of other young Latin Americans, to board a ship heading for Valparaíso, the soul of this wounded country seemed already to have deserted him, and the bucolic countryside he had heard so much about, of châteaux and rows of alders, was now peopled only by the spectres of sorry soldiers. From the deck of the ship, he looked out over the landscape and saw distant valleys fertilised by the blood of men killed in combat, green with buried corpses, the lush ground nourished by mounds of dead horses and mass graves.
‘This country looks ready to host another war,’ he thought.
The day Lazare Lonsonier’s ship berthed at the port of Valparaíso, his mother was waiting for him on the quay. She had grown old, her face lined with worry, looking paler and more fragile than she had when he left her, with the swollen eyelids of those who have cried many silent tears. She was suddenly reminded of the afternoon when she had waved all three sons off to France and now, seeing only one return, she was barely able to recognise him, and confused his name with those of his two brothers for several months afterwards.
At the age of fifty-two, Delphine had lost the vermilion intensity of her dahlia-like hair. More solitary than ever, she had become unstable, like a wax statuette with a labyrinth of blue veins visible through translucent skin that was rarely exposed to the sun. After receiving the devastating letter informing her of her sons’ deaths, she had become obsessive. Ahead of Lazare’s return, she had given orders for the walls of her living room to be scrubbed with a soft soap made of oil and brambles, to purify the soul of the house and drive off warlike spirits. She spent many long hours wandering the high plains of senility without complaint, but plagued by unspoken nightmares and muddled hopes, living within the folds of empty time, until one December night when she became convinced that the family woes could be blamed on weapons. Terrified by anything metallic, she took it upon herself to melt down all the saucepans, door hinges and stair balustrades and turn them into sparkling jewellery, thereby transforming all that reminded her of death into the cast metal of life. Which is why, when Lazare returned from the war covered in decorations, military stripes and medals depicting a woman surrounded by laurels in bas-relief, she fused them with gold in a crucible, repeating over and over again that no military honour and no war pension could ever replace her children, and made them into rings which remained on her fingers until her final hour.
Not wishing to feel cut off from France, Lazare read all the press that reached Santiago. He flicked through newspapers and bought periodicals, lapping up every story. He convinced himself that by sacrificing his youth, he had given more to France than all the exiles of the previous century had done through the prestige of their wines. The Great War had left Chile fractured. Its farming operations, run-down factories and depleted reserves could no longer be relied upon. It became harder to import goods and injections of foreign capital had decreased. The French began setting up sections of the Union des Poilus, Pompe France firefighter companies and veterans’ associations in almost every town. They spoke of Verdun and the Chemin des Dames, told escape stories, compared medals, quoted Clemenceau by his nickname ‘Le Tigre’. The latifundistas of yesterday marked their calling cards with the number of estates they owned. Today, they were printed with their war wounds.
Yet this feeling of patriotic power could not blot out the images of Lazare’s lost years. His heart was like the vine in his garden, planted twenty-four years earlier on the day of his birth, which had taken on a dull colour and off-putting smell, was almost devoid of foliage and no longer produced grapes. Lazare began once more to have visions of apocalypse and bouts of fever and coughing which left him sweating under bloodstained sheets. His head was filled with the sounds of explosions and the clash of sabres, the thud of rifle butts and the whoosh of rockets soaring up in the sky. Visions of his lung operation often came back to him. In lyrical bursts of delirium, he would tell the story in hideous, shocking detail, recounting the smell of turps and the crumbling walls of the infirmary, and explaining that at the end, when they had sewn him up and shown him the half-lung they had amputated, he thought they were presenting him with a piece of his own heart.
French doctors were called – the only ‘true’ doctors in the land, according to his father. One by one a succession of scientists and pharmacists appeared at his bedside, trained by the Pasteur school, disciples of Augustin Cabanès, or literature fans who took themselves for Balzac’s Dr Horace Bianchon. Sitting in a circle in the living room drinking hot coffee, they debated among themselves for hours, proposing complex remedies, some wishing to send him for a cure at an avant-garde health centre in Limache, others calling for the Coué method, popular at the time. Lazare accepted every treatment, followed the doctors’ instructions to the letter, and raised no objection to any regime. But the tablets simply gave him migraines, throbbing temples, an inflamed brow and a skewed right eye, and he felt as if his brain were exploding inside his head like a hundred pieces of shrapnel tearing across a battlefield. The cough persisted; his temperature remained high. Everyone, even his closest family, was surprised to see him still alive. He would wake up in tears, his chest red with fear, the wound...
