The Sichuan Broadcasts

  I was sixteen, it was holiday time and we were in the countryside. My mother took me for a stroll. That wasn't unusual. She was a hiking addict, and we frequently went for long walks, sometimes a few days trek in the mountains, a thousand miles from any inhabited land, as she would often say, quoting from a children's story that was the holy book of our very exclusive, its following being statutorily limited to the two of us, little cult.  

    She wanted to talk. At that time, that wasn't unusual either. For the year past, she had made a few attempts at talking to me. I had so utterly locked myself up, having left school altogether and studying by myself without a friend in the world, coming out of my mute wanderings in the labyrinth of knowledge only to smash plates against the walls in occasional outbursts of blind rage, that she had come to consider that something was going wrong. After half an hour or so through vineyards and apricots orchards, we reached the graveyard of our ancestral village. She led me in and took me through the tombs to the farther side of the low stone fence. She climbed on top of it and sat astride it. I followed. She had me lie down on my back and nestled my head in her lap. From up there, and in that position, I could without seeing her face take in a genuinely picturesque view.
  In the distance, the snow clad summit of the Ventoux mountain was clearly visible. Against that awesome background, our village rose out atop a small hill, a heap of clay tiled roofs, ocher roughcast walls,pastel shutters, shading plane trees and blossoming bougainvillaes. On the highest spot, stood the ruins of a once half-fortified bastide, the canton where her father was born, the last of ten in a family of dirt poor peasants.Lower, on the outskirt of the village, lay the communal school where she was born. Her mother, who had been the headmistress there, came from an altogether different crowd, though not from very far away , only a few miles across the Montmirail ridge, from the small town of Carpentras, one of the jewels of the Popes' estate in Provence. From the school, the hill sloped down in a montionless fall of olive and almond trees terraces unto the graveyard where our forefathers rested, guarded by a still watch of dark cypresses. Those were dramatic enough settings to be sure!
  Abruptly,in a blank voice, she made her short statement: " You know, Alain, he is not your father."
  The cypresses stood still stiller and time stopped. I felt empty, and light. I could breathe. An enourmous weight I couldn't know existed had suddenly been lifted from me. The invisible walls I had always ran into unaware, had become visible, falling apart . Absence had become presence, and vanished. The immaterial reality of the unspoken was shattered.
  Alain was not my father... His last name being my family name, that was a fraud, and I was living under a false identity! My first name already was a misunderstanding. She had always told me that it was Greek for "little prince", when it actually means "God's servant". And I would later go very far in becoming God's servant and escape the uterine hell of being that little prince of hers.
  He was not my father, and everybody knew it. I had grown embarrassed with myself, because I was an embarrassment. I had felt strangeness, because I was a stranger. The attraction of the black-hole of the unspoken had bent the familial space around me and altered the normal trajectories of adults in subtle ways. I had become warily cautious, because I had been dealt with overcautiously. I was a hazardous liability that might go off any moment.
  Because of which I had often been imparted puzzling explications, such as, at age seven or eight, a very unexpected  semantic digression about the correct usage of possessive adjectives in family rows by my after-school tutor, grand-mother: " You see, your uncle", (that is, her son, my mother's brother) "he has shouted" (there had been a big row) "to your mum 'Leave me alone, go to your mother!'. Why did he say 'your' mother, talking about me? I am his mother too, right? That's because in this argument I stood by your mum, so he was mad at me as well. And by using that second person possessive adjective, he didn't mean to give any information about family relationships, but only to express his anger at the two of us by, as it were, setting himself apart from us by means of that little word. You know, it's like when, hem, let's see..."Yes? Like what? What could bee a good example to make the point real clear, something that happens all the time, in all families? But of course, "it's like when a father comes home tired from work, and his restless little boy doesn't behave himself, and his wife doesn't do anything about it, he might say 'Oh, take your son away!' to convey his anger at the two of them." Is that so? And back to his room upstairs would go Little Bastard, back to his beloved stories of lonely wolves in the Great North and sailors stranded on desert islands, wondering where this linguistic tidbit, as handy as it might come in considering the volatility of the family atmosphere and the frequency with which possessive adjectives and other epithets would fly around, did exactly fit in the regular schedule of grandmother's lessons on accords grammaticaux , concordance des temps and other neatly logical delicacies.
  I had been cheated. Somehow, I must have felt it, because I had always been onto something, and I once came very close to exposing the big lie all by myself.
  For my tenth birthday, I had been presented with the best gift ever, a children's Encyclopedia alluringly entitled " The Whole Universe". I had been dwelling on it with delectation for a couple of weeks when I came upon the full double-page, with colour illustrations, about the good father Mendel and his breeding of little peas. It was the first time I'd found something intelligible about that mysterious word, genetics. Simple and evocative words told what genes and chromosomes were. It was interesting. Furthermore, was explained the difference between dominant and recessive genes, and how a recessive characteristic could be passed along generations without expressing itself, until the gene carrying it, after another spermatic race, could combine itself with a recessive counterpart in the chromosomes of a new individual. It was very interesting. And the concrete example given to illustrate that rather complex computation was the eye color in humans. I have very blue eyes. It was getting extremely interesting. The blue color characteristic is recessive, whereas the black color one is dominant. Which means that if the two chromosomally combined genes that dictate the color of your eyes are both recessive, your eyes are blue; if they are both dominant, your eyes are black; if one is dominant and the other recessive, dominant wins and your eyes are black all the same. Now, said I to myself, let's consider that my eyes are definitely blue. That means without any doubt that my eye genes are both recessive. My mother's eyes are blue too. So her eye genes are both recessive too. That accounts for one of mine. But my father has black eyes. So, it must be that he has a dominant and a recessive gene, and that I have fortuitously inherited the recessive one. Thus, it is consistent. Therefore, did I explicitely conclude to myself, if I had had black eyes, and if my parents had both had blue eyes, I would have known that my father couldn't possibly be my father. But what kind of farfetched contradistinct conclusion was that? When the straightforward one was that my blue eyes didn't disprove that my father was my father. But who wanted to disprove that in the first place? I had never, unlike most children, daydreamed that my parents were not my parents. On the contrary, the plot of the family novel that I had fantasized about like everybody else, if only in a somewhat more baroque style than is usual, required my father to be my father.
  So, that's what science had been all about for me: the frantic search to not find the unspeakable evidence. I had discovered science very young, around six or seven, when I had been given my first elements of astronomy. We, mother and us siblings, lived together in the school where she had got her first position. Father stayed at the hotel he managed, a hundred miles away. There had been a big row, the first I can remember, and we didn't see much of him. Mother, in a retaliatory move, had taken an in-house lover. He was a young fellow, quick and funny, who once, dispatching mother and sister around the kitchen with apples and oranges, and holding a grapefruit standing for the Sun, set out to explain to me what the solar system was. I was raptured. It so happens, as I would not realize without some help years later, that the "solar" in "solar system" is a word that sounds pretty much like my last name, that fraud of a last name. No wonder that a little boy, confused by the erratic course of adult bodies around him, and briefly illuminated by a chance homophony, should from then on develop a pathological interest in science.
  I was seized by the passion for truth, and would be driven by an insatiable curiosity across the vast realm of science on a journey of wonder and amazement that would go on for years. I would throw myself on anything scientific that I could get hold on, and leap with a disorderly ardor from a matter to the next. Each time, the discovery of a new field was an extreme joy. But as soon as I would have understood its first elements, what were its specific object and method, its most striking discoveries, my interest would fade, and I would shift to another one.
 It was the way things were found out that really interested me. It was the discovery of discovery that got me excited. The scientists were heroes who fought against the whole world, and defeated error and prejudice. That appealed to me. In contrast, I never grew an interest in mathematics. I liked the math class in school and did my homework with some pleasure: those were good puzzles. Where I come from, mathematics is the major subject in the schooling system, by means of which the elite is selected and trained. But it is taught in the most dogmatic way possible. The fact that mathematics has an history too, and is the battelfield of great wars for truth, is utterly ignored. To such an extent that, in my last year in highschool, I had a classmate who was a brillant student in math and believed that everything had already been demonstrated. He was convinced that mathematicians, those wildest of all wildest creators, didn't create anything anymore. Anyway, I wasn't creative. I was curious.
  I was curious and suspicious. I liked the exact reasoning of the natural sciences, because their conclusions are certain, on the the ground of the stated hypotheses. But the assumptions can be discussed. You were supposed to be critical. And I was on the watch, alert to any new fact or argument that might prove an established truth to be a mistake, a prejudice or a lie. I wasn't paranoid though. I am too much of a schizophrenic already, and the two disorders are incompatible. I suspected things said might be otherwise, but I never assumed that anything could be directed against me.
  They cheated me, but they loved me very much. Their cheating me was the way they loved me. They really were convinced that it was best for me not to know. And I did have a very happy childhood, at least until it started to itch between the thighs. I hadn't any friend, because we moved all the time, I couldn't keep in touch. But I had a younger sister who was the best mate in the world, who did see the palm trees whenever I had decided that our room was a desert island. Our parents were very young, and though strange at times, they were fun to be around. And we had a large family. There were a lot of places to visit, different houses to stay in, interesting situations to observe, because anybody who wasn't on the verge of divorcing, had already divorced and remarried, and all the half-sisters and half-brothers of our parents were more aunts and uncles to us. And grandma, she knew everything. She knew how all animals and plants were called, and how all the words were spelt. She was a scrabble wizzard. She knew that Mao had given tractors to the chinese peasants who were hundreds of millions. And there were rules in her house, I mean serious rules, like grammar rules that you can't fiddle with, not like mum's rules which weren't serious and changed all the time, which you could break as long as you subjected yourself to the tyranny of her unconditionnal love. And there was Granfather, who lived at the countryside and had divorced twice. He had been to places. He had mapped the southern Sahara on camel-back. He had been the sole ruler, civic and military, of the smallest possesion of the lost Empire. He was said to have left there half-blood aunts and uncles we would never know, but who we were sure existed. Dad's family was even larger . They cooked strange foods, and spoke between themselves a secret language, some kind of spanish we didn't understand. They had come from across the sea, chased by the Arabs, and were exiles lamenting on their lost country. Dad had grown up there, and he could count and swear in Arabic, which impressed me very much.