Ok so a long time ago I posted the first few chapters of a book I started translating for my pops. I actually finished the rest of it quite some time ago but I've been reluctant to put it out there (even to my father himself). I'm reposting the beginning as well since it was so long ago.



CHAPTER 1

The 11th of March, 2008, towards the end of the afternoon, in the North of La Rochelle my father killed himself with an old hunting rifle. He had parked his car in a lot and was sitting in the passenger seat so as not to be hindered by the steering wheel. He leaned his seat back slightly, spread his legs, and laid the gun the length of his body to put the barrel in his mouth. And then, with one soft movement, the man that we all called the one with the golden hands when he was working as a physical therapist, with his white coat, his olive skin and his million dollar smile, pulled the trigger.

I must ignore what is pushing me to write these lines, and to continue. Everything is, at once, so confused and so clear. My father who had given me so much, starting with his name, chose to end his life so brutally. At the police station with my brothers Francois and Jean, they showed us the empty casing in a plastic bag. A 12mm bullet used for hunting wild boars. Papa didn't want to miss. It seemed so innocent, that small stem of pink plastic, light as a feather. The police told us about an air rifle, an old model, that rarely exists today. We just looked at each other, we had no memory of this rifle. Our aunts and uncles thought about a Buffalo rifle, an arm made in Saint-Etienne that my grandfather gave to my father on his first day of the 6th grade, at the age of 11. I did the math: 1948 in Tunisia, it was a common gift for a boy in the time of cowboys in the desert of el-Djerid with the gazelles and sheep. But no, it wasn't this rifle. It may seem stupid but we were relieved to know that papa didn't do "it" with the Buffalo rifle given by his own father.

The next day in the mail I received a letter. I immediately recognized his hand writing on the envelope. I hadn't yet cried, I was crying much like a cave, only on the inside. It was everywhere in my spirit, he spoke to me, I heard his voice in my ear, he was everywhere because he seemed to be living in me. His letter was tear wrenching, and it had its effect. The dam burst. I hid away to ride it without witnesses. Inside there were letters for Francois and Jean. He asked me to pass them along, and I thought of the expression, carrying the weight of souls. The packaged was addressed to my home, and suddenly my address made me shiver. A calm street. "Rue du Tir".

There was one sentence that ravaged me in this letter, which was unbelievable in its lucidity from a man who had decided to kill himself and, without trembling, wrote to each of his sons and a couple of close friends, in a hand exceptionally airy, as if he wanted that each word could be deciphered without difficulty, without hesitation. It wasn't his normal handwriting, but large letters, leaning up, traced by some one who is breathing deeply and smelling life enter his body at the very instant he decided to live no longer. In total, six letters sent to every corner of France. And curiously, none of them stamped with a time and a place. I chose to ignore the reason for this particular enigma. It may have been only chance, or a deliberate choice to erase any trace, an arrangement with the post man in the village where he knew everyone, where here he had helped repair a leg, there he had relaxed a back, and reset a hand. This immaculate envelope held the mystery of his death, as though he had personally placed in my mailbox his ultimate message, more than 300 miles from the place where he ceased to breathe.

This phrase, the one that ravaged me, that opened the floodgate said, "Congratulations Eric, you have finished the path out of the Grand-Parc", an allusion to the housing project where I lived with my mother at the end of the 1960s, in Bordeaux, before he met my mother and before they married, before he adopted me, before he gave his name to me and my mother, this name that I wear like a good luck charm that still smells like the South of Tunisia, oriental pastry, the accent of the villages, the heat and the blue of the sky, the dunes of Tozeur and the honey, something infinitely generous that came into his voice and his gestures when he had decided that words were too much and he preferred to remain silent, present only in a simple and tender gaze towards me, or looking for my complicity with a wink of the eye.

At the time I still called him Michel, but his tribe, his family, called him Michou. He was handsome, muscled but full of softness, naturally tan, a thin and expressive face, a good natured character, quietly sure of himself, of his charm, of his strength. Like a Hollywood actor. I am reminded of a scene of Yves Montand in Cesar et Rosalie, about Sami Frey, "You can tell the man's at ease". And Romy Schneider responded, "That's what you call charm". Mom seemed happy with him. One night he came into my room and told me, while scratching his throat, that, if I wanted, he would be my father and I could call him Papa. I met, at that moment, the magic man that colors my books, the books I can never reread, that I pick up now, searching feverishly for the pages where I described him, once a man selling fishing supplies, once an oyster farmer with slashed hands, and finally once, without makeup or fiction, in a book dedicated to "Michel Fottorino, my father." My hands trembled each time that I want to retrace these pages where he is still alive. I am looking for nothing less than proofs of life, proof that he lived, that we were happy together. I realized at that moment the mystical dimension of the written word: characters neither age nor die.

I see in my mind that scene that is in none of my books. Michel and mother have known each other only briefly. One spring night we were walking along the Garonne (a river in the SW of france). We had eaten at an outdoor cafe and now they were walking in front of me, mom had put her arm around Michel's waist, who was holding onto her shoulder. Suddenly I let them move further away until they became tiny points holding onto one another. Their two shadows become no longer two, but one, leaning into the reflection of the river. I extended my arm and held their image in my hand. What I held, in fact, was my future life, my happy life, that felt like it was about to begin; I would soon be nine and I felt as if I were just born. I would soon be named Eric Fottorino, I am a kid from the Grand-Parc, and Michel would come to take me to the football games in his blue Simca, which he parked below our window, and which I looked for every night before falling asleep to be sure that he wasn't leaving, that he was staying there, that he was staying with us.

I arrived in late morning in La Rochelle, and my brothers were waiting. We left for the hospital morgue. In the train I replayed his life, the birth of Francois, the 26 of August like me, but 10 years later, Francois will always remain my birthday present, and Jean, my Christmas present, born the 30 of December 1971, my two brothers never would I consider only counting them by halves.

I was the one who called Mom. He and my mother had lived separately for 25 years. Mom's long scream on the telephone.

One day in Saint-Die-des-Vosges, in 1997, at the international hall of geography, I met by chance Jean Arnautou, whose brother, Jean-Pierre, was a rheumatologist associated with papa when we lived on rue Bazoges in La Rochelle. He knew my parents since the 1970s. We talked about those days with a little sadness because it didn't take a gunshot to break their household. Jean said these words that resonate in me today: Your parents were the most handsome couple in La Rochelle. A useless memory, cruel really, even though I still have a picture of them, in black and white, a beautiful picture, him smiling with all his teeth, with his hair black as a crow, and mother with her milky skin, her rosy cheeks, and her mischievous grin. Their eyes shine They are happy, young. They are alive.

CHAPTER 2

I wonder what he did all day before parking his car late that afternoon. And the day before. And that last night. Nicole, his companion, didn't notice anything odd. He left, like always, after his morning coffee.

Papa, where did you go, whom did you see, and what that particular day? All those days and hours you could have done it before. Did you hesitate, doubt, think of giving it up? But no, you wouldn't have, just the opposite.

I try to imagine all this, but imagination offers me no solace. He didn't try to call me, and I hadn't made the effort to call him. I didn't feel a thing. I still hear the voice of Natalie, my wife, in my ear, that night. She called. I was standing in a train in the suburbs, in the middle of a bridge. Her voice: Some thing happened to your father. And I said: He's dead. I wasn't a question, already a fact. Natalie couldn't respond before the line was cut as we entered a tunnel, but I understood, I knew. But before, when he committed the irreversible act, no, I didn't feel a thing, I must have been in my office, I'm trying to decide exactly what I had been doing at that moment, but to what end? He was already out of reach, with his cell phone which he never used, which he wouldn't answer, and of which I did not have the number. A jolt in the train car made me lose my balance. I reached for a metal handle. I didn't fall. Nor did I cry.

It was actually a beautiful day, the 11th of March. Did he send the letters that same morning, or the night before? Impossible to know, without the post office stamp to confirm, anything is just faith. And faith in what, this man who didn't believe in anything other than life itself, and who loved life up to the end, without God, but with his own morality, his generosity, his impulsive heart and disdain for the established order, far from bigotry and self-ritousness. And when he made the movement to put the letter in the box did his hand tremble slightly? Did his heart skip a beat? No, he wouldn't have trembled because he was only honoring a meeting he set long ago with himself, an engagement that he kept hidden in the innermost depths of his conscious, when he was a soldier in Algeria, in a French uniform, and he was forced to fire upon his own arab brothers ; or maybe more recently when a stroke left him paralyzed. He had to undertake his own therapy, force his arms to move, using small dumbbells covered in black plastic, bean bags filled with sand lifted slowly, exercise spring pressed against the palm of his hand. He managed to recover like a hurt animal, far from onlookers, at my Aunt and Uncle's house in the back of a garage where no one would pass. One day he said to me that if he couldn't regain his strength . . . In fact he never finished that sentence. I only made a small gesture, one finger against his neck, the finger shaped like a loaded gun. My father couldn't have lived as half a man. Even if he was discreet, hiding from the spot light and trophies, he would never have been able to live as a shadow of his former self. That conversation threw me into a panic, but then was forgotten. It's as if he only healed his right hand to prepare it, one day, to strike the fatal blow. I can hear his associate Jean-Pierre Arnatou : "Your father, there wasn't much he was afraid of. To tell you the truth, I don't think he was afraid of anything at all"

Certainly not death, in any case. His clients clients, usually very old, would watch from behind the curtains of their retirement homes, his healing voice would give them the strength to take a couple of steps towards being the young girls they once were.

You would smile at them, one of them waiting for you at the entrance to the retirement home, sitting in a chair, even if she didn't have an appointment with you. She was waiting so that you could speak a little and she would say, My God, I saw him. You were her god, you who believed in none. I can still hear your laugh when you told about your visit to an old woman who had Alzheimer's. Seeing that you were missing your front teeth she said, "Don't worry, they'll grow back, you teeth!" Your imperfect smile, with the black holes where your teeth were gone.

What thoughts ran through his head once my father no longer held those small bits of paper - letters under 20 grams - which said that when we opened them, it will already be done, that he had made his choice, that he had had this appointment for a while now, don't be sad, signed an old child who never want to grow up or grow old, and who had just committed his last act as a free man, at least it wasn't his first.

Two days before his sister Zoune had spoken with him on the phone. He had a clear voice, and a happy one, he felt like he was in a body 30 years younger since he starting exercising again, riding his bike in the park, hiking in the forest, the long trails and the open fields of Aunis. He still spoke of the young deer that he saw, almost blind, years ago, that he cared for patiently in a fenced in enclosure, until the animal, fully healed, jumped over the fence and returned to the forest. He thinks that he still saw it from time to time, wander past the house, healthy and strong. He spoke of it with a soft pride, as though it were his child.

But his sudden frenzy for sports, his last few months, as though he wanted to die of natural causes. Was this his retirement, pushed back year after year, and suddenly forced by the legal age limit for work, his golden name plate that followed him from rue Frederic-Bentayoux in Bordeaux, rue Bozages in La Rochelle, then here in Ferrieres, rue de la Croix-de-Paille, cross of straw, how fitting for this miscreant in the hands of the savior.

I saw these words, the cross made of straw, the heavy and the light. In the end it's the heavy that won. How it must have felt heavy in your hands, despite your strength, that name plate, Michel Fottorino, Massagist and Physical Therapist, the day you were forced to take it down. How you felt degraded and useless, you who agreed to be paid in meat or eggs - when you were paid at all - or a piece of cheese and the conversation that came with it. I am sure that you would have paid, yourself, for that conversation with those women who, to be honest, offered up bits of their life and pain that came along with their arthritis, their stiffness, with the old age that was fast approaching. I know that in your eyes they were still young and beautiful, they still felt interesting since you gave your time so freely. You would just sit on a chair in the kitchen and listen. Friendship and brotherhood, you could see them a mile away. We could say you were a therapist, dealing in humanity, be it suffering or laughing. I remembered one day, I was a spoiled child and at times cruel, I made fun of the town drunk and you said, "We don't make fun of people's misery." I must have been ten years old and it's stuck in my memory like that nameplate of yours, until you had to take it down. A friend of mine, a cyclist, told me of its absence after riding in front of your house. "His nameplate isn't there anymore," he informed me. You never said a thing.

I wonder what happened to it, that nameplate that I read and reread, as a child healed myself by an adoption, that I read to better learn my own name, two t's, three, o's, this name that I immediately love to hear, to say, to read and to write.

What did you do that last day, those last hours?

A week before we had seen him in our country house near La Rochelle, and he appeared in perfect shape, maybe a little too skinny, the thin face of a distance runner, the stomach of a young man, handsome and fit at over 70 years old, his black hair with only a little white at the temples, and his smile perhaps a little forced, in hindsight. He must have known, that spring night, with summer beginning to approach, he must have already decided. He knew. He felt free as only those who know their destiny can be.

I remember that the next day, while on a walk in the village with my 4 year old Zoe, we stumbled upon a cemetery. As we were walking amongst the graves, my phone rang, it was Edgar Morin who was calling to see if Le Monde could announce, the next day, the obituary of his wife Edwidge, who had died the night before. I tried to comfort him as best I could, standing amongst all those graves who didn't yet contain the shadow of my father. I left the cemetery with a strange malaise, a profound sadness without a precise cause, except for the empty voice of an old man crying for the loss of his wife.

I left La Rochelle and we never spoke again, Papa and me. He left a message on my cell phone to make sure we got safely back to Paris. I forgot to call him back. No time, everything in Paris moves too quickly, I was busy and Papa didn't insist, didn't call again. Was he waiting for my call? Hoping for it? Already another time was ticking on his watch, the little hand counting down, painlessly for now. He killed himself and I didn't feel a thing. Not a quiver. Not a pain in my stomach. Nothing. I think about something that Paul Guimard said once said when asked what he would do if he only had 15 minutes to live. The answer : Throw away my watch. My father had thrown away his watch long ago. He no longer counted the minutes he had left. He had broken the hourglass.

CHAPTER 3

The hospital morgue is a hostile place. On the entrance, printed on the tinted glass is a sign that reads "The sun is our enemy, Please close the door behind you". Did you know, papa, you who so loved the sun, that it was forbidden here, in the space you have chosen as your final resting place. Yes, of course you knew. It's here, a couple months earlier, that you accompanied your best friend, Ribouleau, one of those men who could always make a room laugh, always the head of the descent (less so on a bike than in a restaurant). He was your tennis partner, the person who would always laughed at your jokes, your brother. He spoke, and you listened, you massaged him as well, his back, his legs, especially his bum shoulder. I am sure that he loved listening to your silences, so powerful in a way. In reality, the day of his funeral, you couldn't recognize him. "It just wasn't him", I remember your exact words. In his open casket he looked to you like an old chinese man, small and stunted, this man who was easily over six foot. You said Robouleau didn't even come to his own funeral, he was elsewhere and that body certainly wasn't that of your friend.

We had to look through the car for your identification and papers, impossible ordeal that Jean, my youngest brother, offered to perform. He gave us courage through his precise movements, hand on the glove compartment, avoiding the papers with spots of your blood on the driver's seat. Amongst this disorder we found a funeral card giving the date and time for the services for Jean Ribouleau, your old friend. It was almost like an appointment because in my pocket I held the exact same piece of paper, with your name instead, in the place of the deceased. All this hit me at once, almost comically. To truly kill yourself, you had to take the place of the dead.

But before the morgue and its starched silence, there were these carefully chosen words: "Do you want to see your father?" We looked at each other, suddenly frightened at the idea of seeing his face ; was his face visible, even, or had the shot . . . The man comforted us and informed us that he had been prepared and he could show us. Show us? What was this weird world without sunlight where some one we had never met would show us our father? I wanted to tell this man, we know him, he's our father, I should be showing you to him. But I had to stop myself ; I knew my father alive, and I had never seen him dead.

He is lying before me but is not alive. If he were alive I would have heard his heart beating and his breath coming in and out of his chest. If he was sleeping he would scratch his neck, then his breathing would become normal again, the air whistling a little as it moves through his nose, broken by a punch in his rough childhood. In the room, silence, not a breath of life. Our breath, broken. I can hardly realize, but yet this is how it is. He no longer smells of his cologne, no longer holds in his thoughts, no longer has his memory of our faces, our voices. Not a single movement beneath his closed eyelids.

I walk out last. In the sunlight my brothers are holding one another, two young men crying and I see them, suddenly, as confused children simply asking why? And I have no answer. In flashes of light I see the same blue sky, the same city of La Rochelle. In watching over them, in the car while our parents went to pick up a couple of things, I knew that I would never be alone as long as they were both there, Francois looking just like Papa, brown skin and football always at his foot, Jean blonde and always in his own head, red cheeks just like mom, huge brotherly smile and a devastating sense of humor. Their resemblance to papa is a mix of evidence and magic. An expression, a tone of voice, a manner of folding one's arms, closing one's eyes, and staying calm. To say two or three words, and to chuckle. It was written on their faces, and a second nature. Papa lives in each fiber of their beings. I remember the beginning, we share a name, those two ts and three o's. And that will last a lifetime, like I became suddenly normal when I took his name along with my beautiful mother.

And I snap back from 40 years ago. I have vertigo. With a shaky step I go to join them. I sense their heaving chests, their tears, and I join the mass that is their bodies. Us there hugging and crying, you could almost imagine that we're footballers who just won a match, but it's sadness, not joy, that is shared between us.



CHAPTER 4


To be or to have.
A game we played when I was a child.
How did it go?

To be, to be no longer. Papa is dead, papa is no longer, Papa doesn't exist, papa killed himself, papa committed suicide, papa put himself out, papa is in heaven (even kids don't buy this one)?

To have. Papa has put an end to his days, papa has shortened his suffering, papa has succumbed to his injuries, papa has perished, papa has disappeared (right before our eyes).

To have, again, or not to have: I don't have my father, i have lost my father (in 1969, Eric Chabrerie became Eric Fottorino, I had gained a father).

The reconciliation, through death, of to have and to be: to have been. My father has been. Time has passed and it has passed quickly. To be, and to have, to be no longer, to have no longer have. A nearly imperceptible slope, and yet so painful. My father is, lives, breathes, my father was. Getting used to this "was", well that still is. To be: with this verb like no other, the past imperfect deserves its name, underlining that what no longer is will never be. It's now impossible to talk about papa in the present tense, while so few hours ago, yesterday only, at this same time, before that telephone call "something has happened..." A father, and past, now nothing but the past tense. What does your father do, where does he live? He does do, he did; he isn't, he was, he does not live, he lived, he's a man yet nothing more than ashes. His hands, I can still feel their touch on my tired muscles? Past. His voice, still in my ear, his rhythm, his way of speaking? Past. His whistle when he sipped on his hot coffee? Past, only past. The sound of his feet on the tiles? Past, past past.

CHAPTER 5

With Nicole and my brothers, we went to an impound on the outskirts of La Rochelle. We had to take care of the car. It was parked in a huge lot bathed in sunlight and it stood amongst wrecks. It was Jean who recognized it. An old, tired BX, the rear end almost dragging on the ground, much like Giko, my father's old mut. In the office, a woman told us which path to take. We didn't want to take the car. We just had to give them the paperwork and it would all be over. So we walked, slowly, towards the car; only Jean could muster determination, and he walked in front. Were we all thinking the same thing, my brothers and me, on that walk from the office to the car, the final resting place of our father? We asked the woman if the car had been cleaned. She said, no. We could only look at one another. In Jean's and Francois' eyes, and certainly in mine, fear, panic and dread' we will see papa's blood.

Who opened the door, and from which side? Already the memories are blurry. I can still see Jean flipping down the visor looking for papa's ID, avoiding the impossible clutter of the bac seat. At the bottom of a blue grocery bag we find some papers, old journals, three knives -- one for each of you boys, said Francois to break the silence -- some loose change and french francs, and a long stick of polished wood with a whole at the top to pass a leather string, our father used it for his long walks in the countryside. I hadn't seen it in forever, and it seemed like an apt moment to think of forever.

I'm still holding the funeral invitation for your friend Jean between my fingers. Except now it's your turn, and the paper has your name instead.

I went to the passenger side, looking in the glove compartment for his papers, and then, just then, did I have the realization that our father killed himself there. I felt the seat, leaned back, almost an entire roll of paper towel placed carefully on the seat. Moving it awkwardly, I felt the weight of this paper, how it must have been drenched. I dropped it suddenly as if it had been electrified. We did the inventory. We didn't want to waste time. We had already seen what there was to see. And in the end we all breathed a little easier. But without his ID, it would be impossible to get rid of the car. We would have to look at Papa's house. To step foot inside. What could possibly prepare us for this step?

I hadn't been inside his house for years. The last time must have been in spring 2001, when I was training for the MidiLibre (a French newspaper)'s annual cycling competition. I had chosen the windy roads of the West Coast, the roads I knew so well from my adolescence, to try to feel at 40 how I felt at 15. Roads that ran along side the ocean, 100 to 150 kilometers of solitary curves, all under the constant rain of the wettest spring in a decade. In my head, the rhythm of my body and heart fed so many happy memories, when my parents still lived together, when we all spent our days together, my brothers and me, under one roof. At nightfall if I had any energy left I would go to Papa's house. He would wait for me in his office, a bottle of almond oil ready on his shelf. He would have me lie down on my stomach, then on my back. My eyes would open, then close. It was still the same metal pull-up bar on his wall, the same medicine balls on the floor. Papa didn't practice modern physical therapy. No baths, no ultrasounds. Nothing but his hands. And he would only work with one person at a time, never two. Those nights in the spring of 2001, it was me, and I could feel the force of my aching muscles, stiff as a board. He closed his fists and drove them into the arches of my feet. My blood flowed back towards the heart, the toxins washed away. He had some sweat on his brow and just above his lip, which shown from below in the light of his single bulb.

One stormy night the power went out in the middle of my massage. He simply lit a candle; his shadow danced on the wall by the motion of the candle light. For me, there was only his voice, soft, and his hands, firm. We brought up old memories, names I had known 20 years before. That year, he studied my legs like one studies maths; as we climbed back in time, never would I have thought that a race would have allowed us both to become young again. A tap on the thigh and the spell was up, the massage was over. Lightly, my feet again touched the ground.

This afternoon he's not home and we are looking for his ID. It seemed like he had burned all his papers, all of the letters he received and had refused to open as long as they had a business' name on them. It didn't come on in old age, his fear of paperwork. In the 1960s, at only 30, in his first office in Bordeaux, he already would refuse to open letters, bills, insurance requests, even checks. Where did his repulsion come from? Little by little Papa began to live on the fringe, avoiding the rules expected by humanity, working with his hands and not giving a bill to anyone. On his table we found the paper on which he had written us two days earlier; only one page remained. On the back of my envelop was my address, rue du Tir. None of us could imagine him writing those letters, in the silence of his empty home. Did he turn on the radio to listen to the football scores, what feelings went through his mind, at that moment, when he was sitting and writing, already in the past tense, about our life with him? Did he seal those letters, so light in his hands, without think that in ours they would feel as heavy as his coffin?

We didn't touch a thing. Jean, in the end, found his wallet, which contained his ID. We looked at his picture without saying a word. I brought with me a picture of Ben and Tac, his dogs from our childhood. I also took a picture of the horse he bought with Nicole a few years earlier, for my youngest daughter. Natalie and I decided that the dogs and the horse would make for good memories of her grandfather.

CHAPTER 6

Often in the evening they are there. Sitting on a bench at the exit to the train station at Maisons-Laffitte. Old Arabs taking in the sun. There are two, sometimes three, side by side, silent, eyes half-closed staring into the strong late-day sun. One of them reminds me of my father. His peaceful air, the smile always drawn across his face. The bronze skin and the half-accusing finger. They are no longer young men. I've never heard their voices, and never have I spoken one word to them. What would I have to say? They look like they might be your brothers, papa? Long, long ago, we were coming back from a long bike ride, your old yellow Lada was camouflaged on the country roads by the dirt and dings we had collected along the way. They were waiting for us at Zoune and Andre's, your sister who always held on so tightly to her Tunisian roots, with help from her famous chicken couscous and mint tea, avoiding cilantro for you, papa, because you said it tasted like cat piss. We were ready for a good meal, maybe polenta, creme anglaise, you were already salivating. And then, almost home, we came across a car in the middle of the road. The owner must have popped into the house just below. We waited a few minutes, and you didn't honk. You ran your hands through your hair, you always loved to scratch your head, and even more when mom would do it for you. You closed your eyes just like the arabs from the train station, and you felt an indescribable well-being that expressed itself only in small grunts.

After a few minutes, my father finally honked, just to let them know some one was there. A man came out of the house and walked decidedly towards the car. I forgot his face and his weight, but I remember that he was tall and pink. But I remember that, with a nasty look at my father who had rolled down his window, he said "If you're in such a rush, why not just go back to where you came from." Papa went black. All of a sudden he had leapt from the car and I was afraid that they would fight. Papa looked over at me and said something softly, words that I couldn't make out. The man rushed towards his car, but once inside took his time before driving off. My father restarted the car. He had gone pale, with only his cheekbones on fire, May in his cheeks and January in his heart, like they say in Fantasio. He didn't unclench his jaw until we reached Zoune's house. He didn't tell anyone about the incident, about that insult that I also felt in all its violence, even before I understood what it really meant: go back to where you came from.

Today I wonder if that's where you have gone. Your ashes must have flown that far. Maybe to Sousse, where you gained the admiration of your younger brother Francis, ten years your junior, when you took your place in your 'deathtrap', the canoe that you drove, naked from the waist up, tanned and strong, that young, carefree 17 year old body, only a few years before you left to fight in Algeria.

It was only as an adult that I understood my father's childhood pain. **** With his family all together, his parents and his five brothers and sisters, they lived in Gafsa, in the south, where my grandfather Marcel had been mayor since Liberation. 30 years in office, he had held the keys to the city since 1940, after having defeated a Germany colony and avoiding subsequent looting. My grand-father had always been the type of man who would ride 200 kilometers on half inflated tires on the roads towards the phosphate mines of Moulares or Redeyef to take a report on a work accident. When his kids were distracted - the boys sleeping too long during their afternoon nap, for example - my grand-father would whip off his belt. As the oldest, my father got the worst. Everyone says that he got the belt more often than deserved.

But overall they were happy there, hunting gazelle and diving from the palm trees into the roman pools, or going to the edge of town, at the foot of the violet mountains, in the great valley of sulfurous waters, where they learned to swim holding onto giant pieces of bark. Today I like to imagine my father there. He's alive and swimming in the blue waters where divers now bring back marvelous sponges and crabs.

One year, teachers from the city, worried about violence in the south, asked to be moved back to Tunis. They were replaced by arab teachers who spoke poor french. When he passed by the school one day, my father notices sentences on the blackboard that were full of mistakes. Just like that, you were living in Sousse, with your paternal grandmother, cut off from your parents, from your brothers and sisters, from your friends, because in Sousse at least teachers could write French properly. You felt abandoned, left under the lazy watch of your grandparents, convinced that your father and mother didn't love you anymore, even believing that you weren't really their son. If you were, they would have never abandoned you like that, far from all your family. This must have been in your mind, papa, when you adopted me. I was exactly the same age as you when you were moved to Sousse, chased out of the hot eden that had been Gafsa. You didn't see your family except for school holidays, when they came to Sousse, and the sea, leaving Gafsa and it's 120*F behind. Your life, temporarily, became normal, you could hear your mother's voice, play with your brothers, watch your mischievously soft sisters, eat again at the family table, laughter without end amidst the smell of jasmine and rose-water. Until they day the left for Gafsa, where everyone got in the car, your father's beautiful Populaire (which he took from the Germans after the war during the time of reparations). They all rushed off, hearts heavy, because you, you had to stay behind.

As he sped off, my grandfather shot from the window a football and you took off, like a puppy, to chase it down. When you got back, out of breath, the car was already on the road. Zoune, Nine, Nicole, Alain, Francis, they all followed you with their eyes from the rear window. You ran after them as fast as you could, you cried, your tears flowing through the road dust on your face, but you were nothing more than a small spot from the back window of the Populaire, still accelerating away.

This image never stopped breaking my heart. I would have liked to been my father's father to have been able to stop that Volkswagen accelerating towards the desert, to have slammed on the breaks so that you, you could have gotten back in, with us.

CHAPTER 7

I have too much on my mind, and everything is reminding me of my father. Not a drop of blood is running through my veins. Nothing, and yet everything. If I have any energy left at all, anything wiling me to live, it's my mother who is giving it to me, my mother who had me as a child, so brave at only 17 years, sent away to family in the Alpes to hide her dishonor. My mother, yet still a child herself, whose own mother no longer wanted her since she had been knocked up by a Moroccan jew, the man who knew the pain of not being able to be my father, but that is another story. If I can see any good in the world, it's thanks to Michel who came into my life, and mom's, not long after the world cup where Pele was my hero. Michel, also known as Michou, also known as Papa, preferred Gigi Riva, the Italian, and also the boxers : Cassius Clay, also known as Muhammad Ali ; Bennie Briscoe, the robot from Philadelphia ; Carlos Monzon. The two sports that are the most difficult, in his opinion, the sports that make men men, were boxing and cycling. Michel got his nose broken in a fight when, before returning to his father's socialist ideals, he joined the OAS (French nationalist army that fought against Algerian liberation) to defend the French interests in Algeria. That earned him his deviated septum, and he wasn't proud of its cause. I was a teenager before I realized that Michel had a life before us. He lived with a beautiful Norwegian, blonde and blue eyed, and then married another woman. He hadn't had any children, and it's probably for the best because I would not have liked not being his first son, even if it was second hand.

Papa first put me on a bike after realizing that I was horrible at football, and he had a reputation to maintain in the football club in Bordeaux. He would never let a Fottorino tarnish the glory of the family on a football pitch, that would have been worse than anything, even failing a grade. In the middle of the 1970s, papa and I rode on all the roads in the Charente, the Vendee, the Deux-Sevres, the Aquintaine, the Langes, the Gers, even sometimes in Brittany and the Pyrennes, with my uncles Andre and Pierre, and also with my grandfather when we went to the Southwest, towards the Chalosse. He taught me to battle, to never give up, to grit your teeth, to not give in to self-pity or bad luck or failure or the wind, to not get a big head if, from time to time, I won a race, and to not get down if I was stuck far from the lead pack. On the bike, he taught me to live.

The first time he brought us around his family, mom and I, night had already fallen in their village outside of Dax. His mother was sitting, back straight, on a little wooden chair while Nine, one of papa's sisters, was brushing her hair. I can still hair the sound of the brush softly running through her hair, the woman I would learn to call grandma as naturally as her husband would become grandpa. The walls were covered with paintings she had made. We were surrounded by sculptures and busts, she was always working, starting at 5am, a leather bracelet at her wrist when she was chiseling at rock and stone. She had waited until she had raised her six children before coming to France to put on an exhibition. My future grandfather was a huge man with white teeth who laughed when he ate hot peppers cured in olive oil, as colorful as his wife's paintings. It was there that I discovered couscous, fried shrimp, kaak (bread, kind of like a bagel) shaped and baked by my father, my first memories of the South of Tunisia, the attack which my grandfather miraculously escaped in the summer of 1956, which led to his hasty exile in France. Michel-Michou tied me suddenly to this story, to this large family, that I would feel later while watching Rocco et ses freres, a movie that they all loved and knew by heart. I cannot watch Alain Delon in Rocco without seeing my father, his softness, his beauty, almost animal, brutal, in pictures from his youth, when he was banished, in Sousse, the days of the Buffalo rifle. In time I also knew anise biscuits dipped in orange syrup, huge baskets of dates fresh from the curved branches of the oasis at Tozeur, black olives covered in corse salt, green pistachios from El Guettar. The days when my grandmother would make semolina with date puree, cinnamon, sweet couscous with pomegranate cut in tiny pieces, the smell of the orange tree; even writing this brings me back bits of my father, his face when we sat down to eat, the way he would dip arab flat bread, still warm, in cold olive oil, his silence, awe even, in front of tomato salad, grilled peppers, garlic, and lemon -- the feast of a king.

I had the idea of writing an innovatory of what you loved the most in the world, of placing it all out on the table. There would be everything I mentioned, plus chocolate, honey, jams full of sugar, crepes, very thin, that shake in your hands, rolled like cigarettes and placed by the dozen in front of the TV, a football game on. And always soups, pumpkin, potato, everything that grew white or orange, you would finish the same way, slurped up between the words, "Not bad, the soup." You always ate quickly, without hesitation, half standing by the time your coffee came, only to be thrown down your throat. Sometimes you were in a hurry, almost imperceptible, you threw up your hands with a simple "I've got to run," and you left, stomach full. I ask myself what you ate that last day. Where did you eat lunch? Or did you only have one meal? What kind of appetite can you have before the trip you had already decided to take? As a kid I kept the little bits of tobacco left in the bottom of your packets. I kept them in the golden paper that wrapped each pack. I kept this tobacco for years and offered it to you the day you ran out of cigarettes, told you that you could make one with what I had kept. You smiled, I must have been ten years old. I don't know what ever happened to that treasure. Gone up in smoke, I suppose, that too.


CHAPTER 8

My father is everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere and always. That fluid moment just before waking, the invasive numbness that comes as we slide towards sleep. Where is he? Such a stupid question, and yet somehow soothing. I want to call him, to hear his voice, just one last time, once for the road, the long road ahead, the road without him. I close my eyes and he appears, not as a ghost, but as I saw him at 13 years old, in his old coral sweater, as we were riding up the Tourmalet. He had truly become my father, and with all my force and against all my fear, I had become his son. We climbed the switchbacks, never catching our breath. My grandfather was there on his old gray Panhard that sounded like a trombone as he rode. As we rode, I pulled away from papa, by 10 meters, then 20, then 100. My grandfather was proud of his grandson who pushed like a devil against his pedals. Behind me, my settled into an ever slower rhythm and drank sugar water. He is 36 years old and he is smiling at us, three generations of men, immortalized by their efforts. My father and his father look alike, there is something similar in their eyes, determination maybe, a refusal to give up. Maybe something like insolence, but with a little smile stuck in there by accident. When papa reached the summit he raises his hands in the air. I am Coppi and he is Bartali, in the Tour de France 1949. He compliments me. My father washed my in character in those mountains like my wild bicycle had been hardened in a bath of liquid chrome. On the way home, in the car, my grandfather talked of his journeys on the roads of south Tunisia. Papa remembers climbing the Soulor as a kid, the year before he came to France. They saw the Tour in the Portet-d'Aspet (a mountain pass in the Pyreenes). Seeing Fausto Coppi, so thin, so pale, my grandfather broke down into tears. I take on, little by little, their story, I enter into it, it perfuses my memory, softly.

My father and grandfather slowly recreate their native Tunisia, their jackal Dicky, football matches in Sousse, time trial cycling races around the Port of Tunis. One day papa brought home, wrapped in newspaper, sun cakes dipped in honey, zlabias, he called them. They fell apart like glass, our fingers sticky with honey; they had to be eaten in one bite. They are on my mind, those sun cakes, at breakfast before my black coffee, facing the sun rising above the garden, facing they joy of my children at play.

Any little thing and my father is there. His hands, his face, everything that defined him, and the words he used so sparingly. His generosity was silent, made in gestures, looks, raised eyebrows, eyes opened wide accompanied by an "oh!", shocked, or an "ah!", content. Much of the time he seemed simply content to exist. If I called him early in the morning, as he sipped his coffee with the newspaper open in front of him, he would only say "Ah, it's you..." followed by silence. And I would talk, tell a story, and I wouldn't have to see him to know when his eyes sparkled, when his smile was wide. And he would listen, affirm, ask to hear more, his voice clear and happy, punctuated by sneezes if his hayfever was acting up. The only time you would see him cry and laugh at the same time.

Since his death, he lives more than ever in me. The day after the incident, walking towards place Denfert-Dochereau I passed in front of the Montparnasse cemetery and, turning my head, I saw a restaurant aptly named, Papa's Place. Not a day goes by without these strange reminders, as though the dead are playing hide and seek with the living. Some days, Zoe my youngest, calls me pop-pop. Her sister Constance thinks she recognizes her grandfather's hand writing on a letter sent in June for her birthday. It's impossible, and yet... Without thinking, the other night, I plucked a few petals off a bouquet of roses and laid them before my father in a family photo. Fragile memorial of faded flowers, no longer capable of giving you hay fever. A few days after your death a gardener offered to plant at our house, rue du Tir, a tree of Judah (Cercis tree). The name seemed familiar, and I remembered that you loved this tree, with its leaves in the shape of a heart, which your grandparents had planted in Tunisia, and which you offered to plant in Zoune's garden. You seem to be living in my own garden through this tree, so delicate and young, that already has given us superb mauve flowers. With Natalie, a year earlier, we offered you a citrus tree containing one lemon. I remember your surprise, your pleasure, your worry, seeing this piece of Tunisia that we had given you so suddenly. Since, the tree has been heavy with the weight of lemons. You are everywhere, your ashes dispersed but these trees have their roots deep in my memory.

This time we're swimming. Or rather, I'm drowning without knowing it. I'm 10 years old and we are at the beach for a Sunday in the summer. My little boogie board, the nose pointed to catch the waves, is headed out to sea. The currents are pulling me away. I can no longer hear your cries. I get further and further from shore without knowing anything was wrong. By the time I turned and saw how far away I had drifted, and struggled to turn back, it was too late. I can clearly see my father through the shadow of time. He dashed from the beach and dove like a spear, head first. Suddenly between the crest of two waves, he's there. How did he reach me so quickly? He speaks calmly, his breath comes easily. For my mother, back there on the sand, we must seem like two small specs in a massive blue abyss. I can see her running back and forth on the beach, her stomach round with Francois inside, my birthday present to come that August. It's a scene without words, the only sound is the sea. I can tell mom is crying, that she thinks we might be lost, papa and me. People gather. She holds her face in her hands. My father, calm, keeps talking to me, tells me the breathe normally, to stay calm. Because he is there I am not afraid. Confidence in some one comes from the unconscious. Afterword I would learn that each year children, and even adults, perish in these currents. I wasn't afraid, my father was with me, we made it back, safely, to the sand. Saved. My father, with a shy smile, consoled us. There's enough salt water here with the ocean, why make more with our tears? To try and forget our fears, Zoune made a whole fish, so flavorful that we would eat everything and then suck the last bits of flavor out of the bones. The next day we were back on the beach, my father playing with his brothers-in-law, each of them kicking, one after the other, a leather rugby ball, I can still hear the flat sound of the ball in my ear. Later my father would give me a small camera, a Super 8, to better fix my silent memories for which the sound track remains only in my mind, our cries as we ran through a sprinkler, papa's voice, his laugh, his intonation when he said, "Ready, set . . . GO!"

Those were magical years. I was immortal. Nothing bad could happen. I lived a true lie. Yes I am from Tunisia, I lived there in the desert, I saw the oasis, I had camals and foxes as friends, I ate figs, and the only thing I swear by is a puree of dates. I smell bouquets of jasmine, the only flower that is awake while the others sleep. In class I brought a poster of the Sahara and told stories of how much I missed it, I tried to imitate the accent of my adopted home land and the nostalgic tone it required. One day I had to go to the city hall of our village, and I looked at this mysterious document on which my name from Bordeaux was erased. It noted that my parents had been married, that I had been recognized by Michel Fottorino as his son, and that he wanted to give me his name -- at last I understood. A strange name followed on the form, it read Michel Marx. Not Max, which would have been curious in itself (there was a boxer named Max Cohen), but Marx. A joke played by my grandfather, a life long socialist, who clearly wanted to tease the French administration by naming his oldest son Marx. Luck had it that my mother, still a child of 17, would give birth to me in Nice. Which worked well for my plans to become Tunisian: Tunis and Nice, there's only a small difference between the words. Nice Tunis, it makes perfect sense, it's childhood and the art of mystification. Born in Bordeaux or Fecamp, that would have taken more explanation. But Nice, Tunis, only a sea separates them, and a sea is nothing at all. And a father ties them together. Michel Marx did well for himself, and for me; he gave me coordinates that went perfectly with my childhood imagination. I became the first Fottorino born on the other side, French but from Tunisia will every inch of my being. I grew up with this illusion of my origins, I earned a few bad grades when I began to write like my father, that spindly hand, almost avoiding the letters entirely, mostly punctuated with commas and dots above the i's. When they asked me at school where it came from I responded without embarrassment that I was still used to writing in arabic. It's amazing how far a child can take a mythology.

It's already June, almost three months since my father had passed. It's France versus the Netherlands on TV and the camera lingers on Johann Cruyff, the old champion. My heart stopped. I can you you, you just spoke to me. The years melted away from the face of the famous Ductch forward. Suddenly it was 30 years ago or more, back when they still showed the Ajax games on TV. You came home from work with a smile across your face and the words "Ajax is playing tonight" really meant another word, a magic name: Cruyff. You pronounced it Cruiff, and not Creuillfe. There would be crepes on the coffee table and we could stay up late even if it was a school night. It felt like a party. Ajax wasn't a kitchen cleaner but rather a code word that made my father fall back into his own childhood, the days when he would argue about football matched with a newspaper rolled in his hand, barefoot in the streets of Sousse with his friends. If he were alone, he would practice by juggling with an old piece of change with a hole through its center. Football, for him, was a university of knowledge, a school of genius and friendship. Pele, "Cruiff" or Gigi Riva were the men who got him safely through his childhood, and he passed them on to me.

CHAPTER 9

There was a clay statue that my grandmother particularly loved. I remember seeing it for years at her house. It is of a man, very thin, with a hat lopsided on his head. I remember my aunt saying, when she saw it, "It could be Michou!" My memory is a little hazy. What is clear, though, is that this statue is called "The American." My father never went to America, never knew any Americans, and yet two writers from across the ocean wrote about it without him knowing about it, without knowing themselves. It's the spell and the magic of literature to breathe life into fictitious characters that are consistent with reality. There's a page in the novel A Man by Philip Roth. A man on the beach on the Atlantic, staring at the old age that is fast approaching. Here is that page, and here is my father:


"But how long can a man think only the best of old age? Unless the best of old age is nothing but nostalgia for the best of childhood, of that body, yet a young bamboo shoot, with which you can ride the waves as far as they go, ride them arms pointed, like an arrow where the stock would be that torso, those legs, ride the waves until your sides are grated against sharp pebbles, jagged clams, debris from shells . . . He came back with bare feet, soaked, full of salt, the power of the sea murmuring still in his ears ; he licked his forearm to fully sense the taste of the ocean on his skin, roasted by the sun."


Papa's image is there all by itself. The man isn't burned with his bones passed through the fire and his flesh hard and his beautiful mediation face with charcoal black hair. He is that swimmer with his salty skin and his arms that paddle and his legs, naked, his death lost somewhere in that ocean, the water streaming against his copper skin, swimsuit dark against his tan. Splashes and laughter in this eternal swim in the blue ocean of the islands, nothing but the ocean and the sand to eat and drink.

The biggest literary trouble posed by my father came up several years before his death, when i was reading a book by Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude. Auster wrote of his father, my father, and of the death of a lonely man far from his son, living in a broken down house, playing tennis matches and seeing his friends but in his eyes, in everyone's eyes, an invisible man. "He didn't seem like a man who took up space but rather a block of impenetrable space in human form," wrote Auster. "The world bounced off him, sometimes stuck to him, but never penetrated him." I also recognized that stubbornness with which my father let the house where he lived with my mother fall apart. Nothing should survive their lost love, not even a flower. He didn't touch a thing, didn't hear a thing. He was happy to watch time accomplish his work, this rotting. Tennis, solitude, letting things be until the point of abandoning objects and places, the disappearance of life; it was him. Even the furious exercise at the end, hours on his bicycle, had a way of erasing, little by little, of slowly losing substance, of retreat, of being nothing more than a shadow, of not really setting food on the earth, he had lost so much weight, he was hallow, sculpted, and finished by truly taking on the emaciated look of the American, made in clay by his mother.

"I knew I would have to write about my father when I was driving to New Jersey after just having learned of his death. I had no project, no idea in mind of what that would mean. I do not even remember having made the decision. It was there, simply, a fact, an obligation that imposed itself on me the instant I heard the news. I thought: my father is gone. And if I don't do something, and quickly, his entire life will disappear with him."

It has started. I remember everything. I'm making the opposite of a tomb. It's not a cradle either. A monument of paper and knickknacks, he loved them, knickknacks and stories about sleeping standing up. I remember his lotto numbers from years ago, always the same, 5, 15 and 8, in that order, I don't remember why. I remember his license plate number for his old car, the white 4L, 8072 BZ 33. I remember rue Frederic-Bentayoux in Bordeaux, close to the cite du Grand-Parc, the 20 rue Bazoges in La Rochelle, where he took in the sun on his long walks between clients, his white coat buttoned to his neck, with his naked chest underneath. A college friend of mine thought he looked like Leonard Cohen and I let him bring it up time and time again. I remember his number, 05 46 01 94 46, the last few months his voice was no longer on his answering machine, instead an impersonal message from the operator, and now nothing at all. I remember his address, 25 rue de la Croix_Paillee now Croix-de-Paille, 17170 Ferrieres-d'Aunis, and I remember my beginnings, with a fake name, in the newspaper The Cross, I signed my articles dozens of times Michel Ferrieres, congratulating my father for being so prolific in a religious journal, my father the miscreant who brought me more luck than a rabbit's foot, but now flown off, stolen from me, from us, from everyone. I remember that he was born the 30th of August, under the sign of virgo.

CHAPTER 10

Our life together started to fall apart well before the epilogue with the rifle. My mother's photo albums that I keep in my country house have had my father erased from them for years. The missing pictures left white marks like a painting that has been on a wall for years. Separations can be hard on family museums. Memories disperse like startled birds. Pictures of my father, I still have a few of them, include small, stern passport photos. Papa in black and white, his angular face freshly shaven. These images are fixed in my mind. Michou in his uniform, sometimes with his head shaven and naked, sometimes covered in his military hat, his eternal smile still on his lips. There's also that photo where he's on leave at the beach in Oran, the 23 of June, 1958, he's only 20 years old, and he was fighting in the Algerian war that he would never talk about, save once. It was in the middle of the 1980s. A man called, a priest named Vincent. He lived in Peru, in Arequipa, where he taught Marxism. He was a priest who believed in liberation theology, a disciple of Flora Tristan of whom he spoke with the admiratino of a lover. He was coming to Paris and having seen my name in Le Monde, wondered if I was the son of one Michel that he hadn't seen since they had been together in Algeria. My father, friends with a priest? Even if Vincent taught the doctrine of the great Karl, and even if papa had Marx as a middle name, it didn't make sense. I responded with pride that I was Michel's son. Having not heard from his fellow soldier in years, he took this news as if it were golden, and ignored the mathematical impossibilities. Anyone who knew my father when we came back from the war, the heart of a bull and the head of an angel, didn't yet have a son. Papa, who had long been a home body and who refused to travel more than 100 meters from his front door, boarded a train to Paris. I try to imagine what they said to each other at dinner. Father Vincent looked like a guerilla fighter right out of the movies, with a mustache and an intense intellectual stare from behind small glasses. He and my father made quite the pair: the miscreant and his old friend, God's right hand man, if God were a latino man visited by Mr. Marx. They talked about ambushes, atrocities, and absurdities. It was the priest who brought up that decapitated head that they kept several days and nights wrapped in a sheet. Was it one of theirs, or an enemy? I forget. I only remember that image that haunted me for a long time, the image of my father who had to carry, from where to where I don't know, that head. When he came back from the war in Algeria, so full of injuries of body and soul, he was depressed for a long while. One morning, with the cry of "Fighters in the Mountains" he shot into his parent's kitchen, almost killing his own mother.

In 2004, when I had finally understood that my love of literature came from my roots, I published Korsakov as a homage to my father, to his father, and to the entire tribe. My father chose this moment to tell me, nonchalantly, "In fact, I have a gift for you." He disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a pen light as a feather. A wooden pen detailed in gold made by Kaolux. The tip, also golden, retracted when one turned the cap. "One day, in Oran, back when I was a soldier, I was forced to lay down in the sand, and, under my head I could feel a piece of wood. It was this pen." He handed it to me as if it were a prize, a literary award, the most beautiful thing in the world. All those years he kept it god knows where without saying a word. This pen still sits on my desk in a beautiful box I had made. I've tried to have the pen repaired several times, but it still sticks to and tears paper, as if an invisible grain of sand is stuck in the tip, a small piece of Algeria that wants to keep the ink from flowing. So I keep the pen in front of me in order to look at it, to ensure that it still obeys my fingers. Sometimes I take it out and dip it in fresh black in, and I trace a few words. The sound of the pen on paper. I can see my father, his smile almost 70 years old when he first showed me this gift, having waited until I was a man, a writer in his eyes, the guardian of the family history, of the roots that I have used to nourish my once upon a time's. I can see this smile, and I place it on the young man, carefree, on the beach in Oran, stretched out on his side in his uniform, his elbow in the sand and his eyes staring into the distance, a little absent, eyes closed against the sun, two horizontal slits, asking himself what to do with such a beautiful pen, sign his papers or write letters home to his parents, the letters that, little by little, he would forget to write.

I don't want to look too hard at these photos. Remembering them is enough. Papa in his uniform eating with his friends under the harsh midday sun. The food is placed in one large pot and they're laughing, so young and so alive. I cannot help my desire to see these images again, like you might scratch, until you bleed, an insect bite. Under my eyes, pulled out from an old manilla envelope, small format pictures with off-white edges, three young men, one of whom is my father, two squatting down. On the back of each photo, in pencil "Ceccaldi Stadium in Sfax, Artigan, Amar, Me. Score 1-1". Or on another, a red stamp around the words "Tunis Sporting Club, 3, rue Babbleue," and the name Fottorino in blue pen. I am stuck by the delicate nature of his features. His subdued air. There eminates from him an energy almost animal, savage and soft at the same time, virile and slender. In Tunisia where girls are often compared to gazelles, you could call him handsome as a gazelle. Sometimes he had his arm around a friend, or his hand on a football, of he held a machine gun on his shoulder, and as though he had already decided to tame death, a smile across his face. If he doesn't have his hat on, you can see his hair, that mass of black hair, a James Dean type who switches from sun to shade as though clouds often block out his sun. Clouds that come from the inside. It seems as though he's thinking a million miles away, elsewhere, or deep deep inside himself, deep in that abyss. Either way, out of reach.

CHAPTER 11

Before Michou, my life was filled with women. My mother, her mother, these women with their own pain and sadness, one too young and the other too old, two lonely souls with my childhood caught in between. When Michel arrived everything changed. No more fish on Fridays and mass on Sundays -- Michou who didn't believe in anything, save football. Goodbye to dreary Bordeaux and hello to Rochelle, washed in sunlight. Enough of the only son, with no father -- if that's not sad I don't know what is -- and welcome to family happiness, mother and father, and one, two then three boys. Everything changed so rapidly. A man's voice, a man's clothes, leather shoes, tennis rackets and Dunlop balls, new and fuzzy or shaved flat like monk's heads, after so many forehands backhands and smashes, game set and match. Sports Illustrated on the table. The knife with its black handle, a gift from his father. And then there was the bathroom, Gillette blades and an electric razor, aftershave in its glass bottle. Zorro had arrived, without much hurry, Zorro with his charm and his big hat. His white halos of smoke and his beard of shaving cream.

Remembering all this nearly 40 years later still gives me shivers, this spring morning when, by what accident I don't know, papa's phone number came up on my cell as though he was trying to call. When my mother was having her two other sons, 18 months apart, in August 1970 and December 1971, my father and I stayed in La Rochelle, "Man time," he called it. Each night we would go out to eat and we would sit for hours listening to conversations at the tables around ours. We would smile together, quietly laughing at the ridiculous conversations. One time we heard a small group discussing the war in Algeria, and all its causes. After a while my father couldn't take it any longer and ended up engaging in the debate, his dark, Arab skin placing him firmly, in the eyes of these diners, amongst the guilty. I forget exactly what the discussion was about. I only have this memory, a face suddenly somber, eyes black, a blue sky being covered by clouds. We left suddenly, without having any dessert, and we went directly to the cinema to see a comedy, Le Gendarme en Balade, and those old ladies, naked on the beach in Saint-Tropez, had us laughing, tears in our eyes.

Papa wasn't the type to let people walk all over him. I still recall, painfully, that pair of Kickers, bright blue, that were all I wanted for a year as a child. I loved them so much that I put them on as soon as we got in the store and refused to take them off. My father seemed off as he was writing the check ; by then I had learned to read his silent moods, the change in his color, the shape of his nose, his breath all of a sudden heavy and fast. The saleswoman had already offered a special polish and brush, an endless assault that my father refused with less and less patience. But when, as her last blow, the saleswoman offered a special deal on socks, my father exploded, turned towards me and said "Eric, you take off those shoes, we're leaving!" Even though the boss tried to defend his valiant employee, now red in the face, the paternal decision had been made. I took back my old beat up loafers and left the beautiful blue ones behind without a single whine. My father had taught a lesson to the owner of the store, saying that he came to buy shoes for his son and that if he needed anything else he had a tongue to ask for it. He left without turning back, and this time there was no movie to console me.

My father, such a tender man, raised us tough, always repeating "In my day..." If he caught me sleeping on the drive to school he wouldn't hesitate to roll down the window, the cold morning air shocking me awake. I remember the smack in the face coming from outside the car, and the satisfied look on his face. If I would forget a mathematical law, he would tap me on the head, asking what he gotten stuck in there. He was my biggest fan in my younger days as a cyclist, but if he thought that I was sticking lazily in the middle of the peleton, he would yell from the side of the road, "If you don't push harder, you'll ride your bike all the way home." Half joking, half true, that I took with enough seriousness, especially when the race was far from home. My adversaries, who only knew my father for that one moment, appreciated more than anyone his sense of humor.

CHAPTER 12

I don't look like him. Not physically, not a single expression on my face can be traced back to him. Nothing in common, not even our hair, my head as bald as a cue ball and his hasn't seen the slightest erosion. It's useless trying to trace my image in the mirror to hope to find the smallest piece of him. I chose to look, instead, to my younger brothers; they are, today, the same age that he was when, after a long adjustment, I was finally able to call him papa. Francois has his smile, his subtle laugh, that added so much to his charm. Jean, the younger, is his spitting image, his long face, almost triangular, and his smile too. If you put together Jean and Francois you have a pretty good approximation of Michel, with the addition of our mother's softness, her light skin kissed with red freckles, which give them, thankfully, a heritage passed down from our mother, a heritage that I share.

Papa looked like his father, and now there they are, the pair of them reunited amongst the dead in some cemetery in Dax, it's become impossible to ramble about their common voice, their gestures, so similar, their shared appetite for life. Now you have to close your eyes, and remember.

More than once I thought that I looked like him, I acted like him, in his image. As my model, he left his imprint on me. In the end I took on the tone of his voice, the way he arched his eyebrow. I was a blank page, and I let him write all over me. I copied him carefully, like a trained monkey. And when one night, while walking down the main road in La Rochelle, his friend who owned the coffee shop saw us, it was with the cry "Like father like son!" the he got our attention, calling out to our assumed resemblance. My father and I looked at each other, without a word, and then we laughed out loud, flattered. We were both happy that a stranger could truly believe that we were flesh and blood. Too bad if he was just trying to be polite, if he didn't believe one word : he had said it and we had wanted to believe.

How it's unfair to my mother, what I've written, my mother who did everything for me, who made my entire world until I was 9, without any father, and in spite of all the doubt and humiliations of a young mother in the countryside in the 1960s. How it's unfair to say that I wasn't born until the day that Michel Fottorino entered into our apartment in the projects of the Grand-Parc in Bordeaux. I was born the day that I could throw my arms around him and call him Papa when he hadn't done anything but rustled my hair in his hands. I was born when he noticed my underbite and talked to Andre, Zoune's husband and a dentist. We went to see him immediately to avoid what my father worried would be a protruding chin. I was born when he added his voice to my mother's to tell me to stay on the right path, to stand up straight and not slouch. I can still hear his voice saying "Stand up straight!" Lesson learned and retained.

CHAPTER 13

I imagine. He's sitting in his kitchen writing to me, writing to my brothers. With whom did he start? What did his face look like just then? Is he relieved? Calm? Yes, in my mind he is very calm, sure of himself and his actions and his words that he is leaving behind, so legible, on that white paper. I imagine that the radio is on, but that he isn't listening, he's focusing on the words he wants to say before he leaves. He's taking back his freedom. Once his golden nameplate was removed, he lost his identity, his reason for being, his engagement with others, which it seemed like nothing could erase. He couldn't standing needing anybody.

And he writes, he is himself. He's never felt better than at this moment, in my mind. He is free because he's removed all his weight. He's only waiting to take off. It's all written, like a musical score. He's going to die, so what, because he's not afraid of death. He's alone in his messy house. Maybe he can hear a dog bark in the distance. His own dogs are dead and buried, Phartas, Ben, Tac, those hunting dogs who ran in their sleep, their front paws scratching the air. He's only waiting for a gun and a bullet, nothing more. Is he thinking of each of us, of our faces, as he writes us one by one? And if one of us had called at that moment, would he have answered? Would he have forgotten his task, talked for a minute about the good old days, before beginning to write again. I wonder if he was picturing Tunisia in his mind, if he saw anything that would make him miss the life he was giving up. No, probably not. He lived deliberately, without self-pity, and what would he change now? He had had a beautiful life. He will end his life with his health intact. Death only inspires in him indifference. He would not allow old age approach.

CHAPTER 14

Today I am retracing his steps through my books. He comes back, alive, on those light pages, through the smell of ink and paper. A novel, that's my blood and guts, my deepest sentiments, fragments of my very existence reduced to letters on a page. When you write, it's impossible to understand everything that you write. Gide said that, and he was right. The child that I once was could not have imagined the immortal figure that he would make of his own father. Each page I turn, a sentence jumps out with new meaning. By turning the pages, I bring him back to life. Pulling him back, resuscitating him, giving him a voice, a silhouette, his look, the kindness that emanated from his gruff silences.

I remember my first novel, Rochelle. I asked my father to find a drawing for the cover. He performed his duty, finding a simple post card, a picture of the port of La Rochelle with emptiness where the sea should have been. I had told him that in Rochelle the sea disappeared. And in the image he chose, the sea was truly no longer there. Word of man, word of god, no place for irony or the figurative. He wrote very little, and if he did write it was always a linear story, flat as a discontinuous line, marked only by accents and punctuation. It was a wall difficult to break down. Only that last time that he wrote to me where he, for the first time, made the effort necessary to round all the angles and connect all the dots in his style, typically so like morse code, arabic, or whatever musical style, finally some urgency on the paper from this man who practically breathed nonchalance. The day that I gave him a copy of La Rochelle he looked at the cover, his cover, and the name, his name that I had taken and blown up, so beautifully printed. Name and fame. Birth and rebirth. He made me sign a few for his clients, his tennis partners, his careful eye on me as I wrote a few personal words to each of them, following the directions he gave. In Rochelle my father found himself as Etienne Dupaty, a fishing-supplies salesman and a fatherly figure, owner of a little shop in the old city. He blushed red with confusions when his friends remarked that he had become a literary hero, quietly pleased, betrayed only by his silent happiness.

I reread what I wrote 30 years ago, dedicated to the first man in my life:

"I love Etienne. Don't mistake this love, so explicitly stated. It must be firmly placed in the context of of the emptiness that preceded his entrance into my life. Before seducing Lina, it was me he had to convince. Well played. If he didn't know how to tame me. I would have distanced him from her, eliminated him, like i have with so many others. Adults were never afraid enough of children, and I could do serious harm. I think that we liked each other immediately, Etienne and me. And, to make me laugh, he asked Lina to marry him by throwing himself at her feet Today, I can only speak of him as a lover. It might seem ridiculous, it might disturb you, but I can't explain it any other way."

I am disturbed to remember that in Rochelle I made my father not only a salesman fishing supplies, but of hunting rifles as well. And then, there was this passage new the end of the book:

"The scene has been ingrained in permanent ink in my memory. Lying on my bed, I was reading an adventure book, I forget which. The door handle turned, and Etienne entered and sat next to me. He was awkward, intimidated, as sometimes people are by children. He rubbed his hands together and, looking at little Paul, he asked if, if he wanted, he could become his father. "You could call me papa because we would share our last name." With just a shared look between them, he tapped the boy on the head and stood up."

Thirteen years later, in Korsakov, my obsession came back like a sickness that I couldn't cure. My father was no long named Etienne, but now was called Marcel. He farmed oysters in a village close to La Rochelle, my mother was still named Lina. There's a passage similar to those in Rochelle, my obsession turning round and round the same abyss, the vertigo of love.

"One night when he was in bed waiting for his mother's goodnight kiss, Francois saw instead the oyster farmer with his wide shoulders, his black hair, his large hands. Francois felt as though the very ocean itself had come into his room to take him away.

"It was as simple as saying hello. Marcel asked the child if he wanted him as a father, and he would marry Lina. And of course, Marcel continued in the same breath because he wasn't used to speaking to children and prefered to say everything at once, of course, if you'd like, you can take the name Signorelli so that we'd make a big family, the three of us."

The image comes back to me of us together on the rocks at Nieul-sur-Mer, in swim trunks, you dark as a boar and I am tan as well, father and son there on the rocks, almost looking alike, it wasn't so long ago that I had started calling you papa, but it feels an eternity. You're getting used to it as well.

CHAPTER 15

The more I look at my own work, the more I see him. A few times I was shameless. I wouldn't have done it if it weren't the only way I knew to get closer to him.

My father appeared as a metaphor in Un territoire fragile, a novel about a 20 year old girl who suffers pain in all her limbs and a "tuner of bodies", a mysterious character full of delicacy who defines himself thusly : "I tune muscles and vertebras like a man would heal a piano, making its strings soft again, bringing back harmony. I've given my life to it, the work of tuning. In the end, I cannot imagine a work any more human." This is my father. The concern that ran from his eyes to his hands, the warmth of his face channeled directly through his palms and fingers. I appreciate the therapist that he was. Is therapist the right word, or does wizard better fit his work, a wizard able to enter into the skin of each of his patients. After high school I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I filled out applications for physical therapy schools until the day I realized that, unlike my father, I would be incapable of touching the ill, of bringing comfort simply through the contact with my hands. I cannot imagine that modern physical therapists use their hands as much as they do equipment that is becoming more and more sophisticated by the day. But like in everything, with my father as a role model, the man who still received his clients one by one, to better follow their progress and improvement. Comforting them also with his voice.

It's a revelation to me, these pages of Un territoire fragile that I haven't touched in so many years. Through the eyes of young protagonist Clara Werner, who trusts the tuner completely, I see my father's office, I hear him speak. The words that I borrowed from him, and the words he never said are thick in the air when he practiced his art, without doubt also transmitted through his hands onto and into the skin of his patients, as they are printed in the back of my mind.

Where to start? My father's office, viewed through the eyes of Clara. Here we are. Here I am.

"His healing room was an empty space with balls and cords hanging from racks along the walls. Standing upright is a model of human musculature made from wax, the muscles blood red, eyes straight ahead, made from wool. On the ground are medicine balls of all sizes. I can see barbells of different sizes, weights marked on the side, but none larger than 10 pounds. There are also tennis balls, I remember now how they could heal a cricked neck. I took several sessions to notice the medicine ball that the tuner used as a chair when he had me lay out on a thick blanket and covered my back in warm massage oil. The smell of almond and camphor slowly filled the room. Two soft lamps filled the room with a warm light."

If we remove the wax model, we are in the ambiance that, for 45 years, filled my father's life.

I was thinking of him as I wrote this novel, traveling through the territoire fragile (fragile territory) that was the hurt soul and body of Clara. It was his hands that I described through Clara's eyes when she said, "The first thing that I see are his hands, his closed hands, delicate yet so strong, I could almost say piercing, as though his fingers and palm are able to see." These lines adopt the lines in his palm, the trajectory of his look, when, finding at his door a suffering being, he deployed all his energy in trying to heal.

My father preferred to stay quiet and speak only with his hands. He wrote his lessons on my body without my ever understanding. The man with the golden hands, who become the tuner, quietly taught me all the secrets of the human body, the popliteal hallow, the muscles to be pulled, muscles to be stretched, to massage, to flex, the meridian lines, tendons, ligaments, pressure points and scars. Sometimes he would take my hands and massage them a long time. Which brings me back to the words of the tuner : "Remember, he would say, if he felt like sharing with me, not to be confused with trusting me. Memory is vigilant, she only gives up what she wants. Your hands will say it all. Read their skin with your eyes closed. Your hands must be affectionate, or rather, be able to hold force as would a magnet. A blow on your skin is like a rock thrown in a pond. It is the beginning of waves, invisible waves, circles growing ever larger around the point of impact. If your hands are good they will find these rings and trace them back to their origin. The art is to attack this pain, to obliterate it. In every battleship their is an imperfection.

The tuner, my father's double, only more talkative, followed with a little lesson on muscles. "There are more than 500 muscles in the human body, smooth, striated and fanned. It's easy: striated are easily controlled, the biceps, the calf, the ability to walk, to run, to escape. The heart is also a striated muscle. I think that you can control the moment of your own death. A full life is 5 million heart beats."

Knowledge was infused into me during those sessions with my father, after a big race. I would arrive exhausted, he would tell me to wait in the other room, separated only by a curtain, the room where he taught patients to walk again, where patients relearned to use an arm or a leg. I would lie on my stomach in my shirt and boxers, waiting for my father to arrive, at least, with his bottle of almond oil, to repair my muscles. From far away, I would hear his voice, stretch slowly, lift your leg slowly. Slowly slowly slowly. It seemed like a music lesson without music. His flexible hands harmonizing my movements. I would often fall asleep. The massage would continue, the words penetrating my spirit, Then, get dressed, slowly. Slowly I got up, stood up, the floor creaked, the patient standing on the balls of his feet, shoes in his hands. We would look at each other, my skin and muscles rebuilding themselves as he asked questions, always the same : How many kilometers? Was there wind? Who was there? Did I win the sprints coming out of the villages? Did I hurt anything while on my bike? Then, where was I sore? Afterwords he wouldn't speak, only his hands spoke on my worn out muscles, on those bicyclist's legs who dreamed of winning the Tour, of wearing the maillot jaune. Dreams forsaken at 20, but alive yet at 15. My father did nothing to discourage me because he liked the idea that I had big dreams and that I forged character. He was my tuner, of body and soul.

On race days he was there for little tune ups. If he let me lace up my shoes, he was there pumping air into the tires to just the right pressure. I sat in the back of the Lada, his beloved car, on the open trunk while he inspected the tires, the derailleur, the gear handles, prepared bottles with cold water. Before starting, I got a quick massage just to warm up, he tapped on my muscles more than massaging them. In the end he didn't care if I won, even if he loved it secretly when I win. What mattered to him was that I rode well, rode hard, rode with all my force. Around 20 years old he let me see the difference between the good racer that I was and the levels above it would take to be capable of racing in, and winning, the Tour. He knew that desire didn't give one talent. But he let me discover it alone, without ever breaking my dreams with coolness or a lack of enthusiasm. It was just the opposite, he had reached his goal, he had passed on to me his sacred fire.


CHAPTER 16

It has been on my bike that I am bringing my father back to life. On the first day of the summer vacation I rode without stopping through his village, not a single look back but with my throat tight, it was too beautiful out to be taken away by sadness. The thought jumped on me as I rode: for the first time he won't be there, I won't be able to call him at home, early in the morning, his happy voice asking, "So, you made it back safely?" It will be my first summer without him and I will have to get used to his absence. But still lurking in the road, but still waiting for his visits, his sihloutte behind every door.

This morning, getting onto my "Jimmy Casper" (a bike given to me by the French rider after the 2001 Midi LIbre) like a cowboy mounting his horse, I head towards town hall, in that immense countryside between La Rochelle and Marans, a strong side-wind, memories racing through my mind. I ride along the canal where my father had ridden so often in his final days. Did he hear what I am hearing, see the same sea, the same road, feel the same wind? It is on these very roads that he took his final stand, where he gained the courage necessary for the act. It's here that he must have remembered the beauty that the world contains.

I ride my Casper, the bike who shares a name with the little ghost I adored as a child, and I look for you in the shadows along the route. I pass fields of sunflowers and the miraculous little suns are the only proof that man exists in this untouched landscape. Wisps of clouds float, almost transparent against the blue of the sky. The joy of riding through such beauty and the sadness of never again sharing it with you. My memory stutters. "Eric, the breakaway pack is only a minute away, you can catch them!" And it's you. You're young. Watch in one hand, water bottle in the other. Soft smile if I'm ahead, closed eyes and stern look if I'm lagging. You're as constant as a tree planted along the side of the road, shouting to me the route to victory, or defeat, a question of honor, of life or death, at fifteen years old.

Thanks to you the Lord's day become race day; I have up the boredom of mass to go pedal like a devil, glory in sight just up the road, around the corner, races in every town and village, and you were always there ; whether I won or lost, I think we never loved each other more than in those mutual silences, in your look that lifted and pushed me ; I had to grit my teeth, eat the wind, burst my lungs ; you'll be a cyclist yet my son.

You loved me softly, without effusion, like you might whisper so as to not disturb the natural order of things. You loved me softly, without saying it, without feeling it necessary to say it aloud. It was so strong -- and the evidence so ample -- that you didn't need to shout it from the rooftops. I only learned through the slip of a neighbor or a cousin how proud you really were of me. And I have my consolation : you left early but you had the time to be proud of me, of us, your sons. Francois with a football always at his feet, Jean with his bass guitar, and me, the odd son that I must have seemed, armed with a bike and a pen.

Chapter 17

We left Bordeaux for La Rochelle, on the coast. I didn't know how to swim, but it didn't matter because my new father was, for me, the ground.

Our house was in the heart of the village Nieul-sur-Mer. Today I am retracing the small roads that lie between land and ocean, between ocean and sky, a lacework of clouds filtering the July sun. Here, for the first time, I breathed in the ocean air, along with the fresh air of freedom. We would go fishing right in the village, and the fish were plentiful, always on the line within a few minutes, flying through the air on the end of that nylon string, then lying in the grass, gills palpitating like a beating heart. On the way home, fish heavy in our basket, I picked flowers for my mother. The countryside looked yellow to me, a sign of my future glory in the Tour.

Each turn of the pedals brings me back to those days where I had a mother and a father all to myself, little brothers still on the horizon. Sometimes my father would bring us to Mole d'escale, at the entrance to the port that security hadn't yet closed to the public. We went in the middle of the day, finding huge gas tanks and cargo containers holding goods from Cameroon or the Congo. If we went at night, my father would tell ghost stories and each shadow would appear ominous in the orange light of the streets. Story tellers would gather at night and paint pictures of sand and pharos. Fishermen would wander out onto the rocks, casting shadows in their ponchos. We felt at peace in that mysterious universe that smelled of iodine and was covered in rust.

Sometimes my father would also bring us to the fishing market in the village. Sole, monkfish, prawns. The daily catch was thrown in mix that we tried to understand, the raised eyebrows of a buyer, the gesture of an index finger and a thumb of a seller.

The index finger or the thumb. Suddenly I'm flung back into my morning nightmares, nightmares that paralyzed me on Sunday mornings when I should have been sleeping in. The final scene is before my eyes. I take my father's eyes, his smile, and place them on a man, silent, getting into a car. He moves back the passenger seat, places a cold barrel in his mouth. 10 times, 100 times, since the 11th of March, the same scene. Did he use his index finger, or his thumb? I try to imagine, to visualize. Is the trigger hard, or soft? Did the shot go off immediately, or did my father sit like that for a minute, in the position, taking in the last sounds of the world around him, that empty parking lot, and then pressed down softly, unrelentingly. And the sound? Dry, or muffled, smothered? Ten years earlier, a friend of his took his own life and he asked a million questions of those who knew what happened, a curiosity that must have been difficult for his family. Why did he want to know so much? Week after week I find myself asking the same "Why?" and I haven't found a response. Did he hesitate a fraction of a second? At the moment of the shot did his thoughts fly from his head like a popped balloon or soap bubble? Did he see us one last time, see me? Did he see lights, or the light?

I remember other gestures of his finger, of his thumb, as enigmatic but less sinister than his final motion. Once he brought me to a seafood restaurant that had all sorts of fish laid out on ice. I chose the largest oyster I saw, and I can still see his family, starting nearly at the corner of his eye, and I can still hear his laugh when he saw me eat the clam in one bite, and spit it out just as fast, ready to vomit. I was as white then as I was red when I first took a mouthful of hot sauce. The simple happiness of colors, back in those days.

I ride on and there below me I see the submarine base built by the Germans that no one could destroy, where Spielberg shot a scene from Indiana Jones. I ride past silos, up concrete curves, up the coast of Houmeau where, for the first time, at 13 years old, I passed my father on his bike, who said under his breath, joking "little jerk!" The road turns. These roads and countrysides are mapped in me, the watermark is authentic, lines and signs of life.

CHAPTER 18

It's a beautiful story, a story of freedom, of love, of respect. It all became clear in my mind the 15th of July, 2006, in Esnandes, my village just outside of La Rochelle, when Natalie and I were married. My father was there, all smiles and dressed in white. There also was my biological father, Maurice Maman, a retired gynecologist, all smiles, and dressed in white, a Moroccan from Fez who naturalized as a French citizen some 40 years ago, and Michel, from Ferrieres, a Tunisian in exile. They met for the first time that blistering summer day, as though the sun wanted to celebrate the pieces of North Africa that shone on their faces.

In the evening, at the aperitif held on the beach, MIchel walked over to Maurice and told him how happy he was to meet him. He took Maurice's hand, who must have thought my father was saying goodbye just before leaving. But no, Michel held Maurice's hand in the silent sign of affection, the pleasure of simply being together, like they do in North Africa when deep in conversation, except my father said nothing and stood with only his smile, so disarming and warm, all of which confused Maurice,

Two fathers on my wedding day, none the day I was born. A mother, just 17, and alone all throughout her pregnancy, coming from the upbringing of a strict catholic mother who could not suffer to see her daughter married to a Moroccan jew, a medical student in Bordeaux. It was a nightmare for my mother, and also for Maurice, who was forced to return to Morocco, his medical diploma in hand, who as a gynecologist participated in thousands of births but missed that of his own son. As a child I understood the suffering my mother had been through, and the courage she had to raise me alone in the early 1960s. I also understood, or now understand, Maurice's suffering who I saw for the first time at 17 years old. He had just returned to France and I was able to find him through the medical unions. Attempting to see him gave me the terrible feeling of betraying my father, Michel, who had given me his name and had raised me along side my mother. It took time to be able to put the pieces together, to not reject Maurice, to love the one and the other without feeling pulled or stretched, Michel forever my father, and Maurice whose blood ran through my veins. Michel and Maurice.

I can see myself that winter evening in 1977. I had met my father in his office on the rue des Bazoges. I waited until his last client had left. I told him: You know you're not my real father, so... He looked at me, his eye shining, knowingly, in a way I hadn't seen, his cheekbones suddenly purple. I choked on my words, then, "I think it'd like to meet the man who made me, just to see his face, see what he looks like." My father said ok immediately. Ok. It's a story about freedom, and a beautiful story in the end. It was Michel who, one morning that same winter, drove me to the train station in La Rochelle, an early morning train, and the roads were still icy. The Lada moved slowly, slid to the left, to the right, Papa drove carefully but he didn't want me to miss my train, even though he was anxious to see me move towards "the other." You didn't say much, you focused on the road and the ice. You were torn between the break and the gas pedals. Because of the ice. We'd be on time, don't worry, these russian cars are built for the ice. I wasn't worried. At the other end of the train, Maurice was waiting, and I could see right away that we looked alike. Papa I know you were worried about losing me. And Maurice wanted to take me away, but he could feel the link that held me to you and he didn't want to break it. He had that tact, that humanity, that understanding. It took me a long time to get comfortable, I was distant and sometimes cruel to this biological father who never had an easy role to play. Michel was quickly reassured, he was my father and nothing could change that. Then carefully, over the course of many years, I was able to make room for Maurice, but his own place made from curiosity, respect and finally affection. And it all led to that July day in the sun, my wedding day, with these two men holding hands in silence.

Whenever I visit Maurice and his wife Paulette, who have invited me often into their home in Muret, I cannot help but focus on one particular detail. On his desk, almost haphazardly placed, is a golden nameplate: Doctor Maurice Maman, Gynecologist. His whole life written in so few words. I see that nameplate and I think of another that reads: Michel Fottorino, Physical Therapist.

CHAPTER 19

Maybe everything I've written, that I am writing, only makes sense to me and a few people who loved him. But that's enough. I chose the written word to hold onto everything that can be overcome by the fog of human memory. It is said, it is written, it is how it is, the flesh and the sun, the shadow and the noise, the memories that wash over me, the details that seem too trivial to write, his accent, his allure, his look, his dignity, all of that remains alive, the line to him isn't cut as long as I can feel the energy of these words, words that lead to images, sounds that bring him back. A new recipe prepared by my wife and I hear him "Try some! But you haven't tasted it yet! Taste it already!" He said that about everything, polenta, hummus, or couscous, shrimp cakes fried in oil and kept warm in the oven that seem to melt on the spoon in your mouth.

Today, driving out of La Rochelle towards Esnandes, I took the route that he must have taken on that fateful day. For a few hundred yards, upon reaching the parking lot where he did it, I tried to put myself inside of his skin, stopping at the light, passing in front of the school, turn right and park near town hall, with everything left to do still on my mind. I noticed a bicycle lane and a sign that read, Esnandes, 15km, with a small logo of a bike. Did he think of me when he saw, upon making his last turn, the name of my village and this reference to a bicycle? I doubt he even noticed this detail. In the end I will never know. I think to myself that it's stupid, nothing but a small reference to my village and a bike, his thoughts must have been elsewhere, him being so close to death. I must be vain, or simply inconsolable, trying to hold onto any small thing, reaching for straws that do not exist.

I shook myself out of it and drove straight from there to Esnandes, without even looking at the parking lot, I pressed down on the gas pedal and drove, as though I was running for my life.

I want to tell him that his granddaughter Constance, at only 10 years old, climbed to the top of the Ile de Re on her bike against a strong headwind without touching her foot to the ground. That she rides through the wide curves of the Pointe Espangnol. To tell him that Zoe, at four and a half, asks if you can do whatever you want in your life. Asks if the bark! of the dog is the same as the bark! of the seal, and asks who can imitate the two to show her the difference. Tell him that she hides candies in her shoes, that she keeps a photo of him in her room, that he still exists in her childhood games that roll on in carefree circles. In reality, I do tell him all this, but the dialog is one way, there is no interruption, he has moved on to an elsewhere that is beyond memories and dreams, that dilates time itself into infinity.

It was yesterday: He is walking in Zoune's garden a summer night, no shirt on, holding my oldest, who was having an asthma attack, on his chest. He holds her close, talks quietly into her ear, calmly: Just breath honey, breath, baby, he said. And she breathes. Now he takes Elsa by the hand, her younger sister, tiny but talkative, she tells him a million different things and he responds only with his smile, smiles and looks at her, what a gossip, this one here, he loves her silently, he doesn't know how to say it.

CHAPTER 20

I remember that it was an impossible task to pronounce that name -- never before said, it would only call attention to the absence. A single syllable doubled, the most natural word in the world for those who have been taught it since before the can remember: papa. At almost ten years old, already grown, I learned to say papa. Timidly at first, then louder and louder, with confidence, because he had allowed me to say it, loud enough the whole world could hear. Papa, said only for the simple pleasure of hearing the magic word, brand new. I knew him for 38 years and during all those years when he called me on the phone, it was the first word I used, it never got old, this word from the past, always on the tip of my tongue, like my heart feels now if I repeat that word in silence.

CHAPTER 21

I hadn't paid any attention to the large blue garbage bag sitting in the dark towards the back of my garage. One morning, the sun streaming in through the open garage door, it popped into my vision. This was the bag where we had placed, my brothers and me, all the objects that we found in my father's car. I plunged my hand inside, apprehensive. From this mish mash I pulled a few things that, sitting next to each other, constituted a fairly accurate representation of my father. A pack of anti-alergy medicine, and writing these words I can still hear my father interrupting himself on the verge of a sneeze, and waiting for the it to come, again and again until the liberating moment. In a sunglasses case my father had hidden a hundred franc bill, long since useless. This brought back memories of his house on the day when we were looking for his driver's license. In every room, dusty furniture, on every corner and table top sat coins, now worthless, one franc, five francs. My father had an interesting relationship with money, it seemed as though these coins surrounding him like pebbles were some how reassuring. He always needed to have cash on him. I can see him in his light dress shirt with a few bills, folded back on themselves, visible in his breast pocket. He owed large sums to a few professional organizations but he seemed to pay that no mind throughout more than 40 years of his life. The paperwork accumulated, letters from every bank and collection agency. He didn't open any of them, never, and those few bills he had stuffed in his shirt pocket seemed to protect him against the mountain of money that he owed. I closed the glasses case with the bill still inside. Another bill, this time worth 5 Euros, was sitting at the bottom of the bag. I used this money to buy his granddaughters a packed of candied pralines, still warm, at the La Rochelle port, I think my father would have found this the most fitting use of his money.

All these words appear to dance before my eyes. They seem to fall beneath the weight of this day, quiet and cold. But there is a life still there, visible through the words. Like the recipe for a cake flavored with anise copied in his hand on the back of a pink envelope. 1 kilo flower, 2 packs of yeast, 300 grams of sugar, six eggs, 1 spoon of olive oil, salt, green anise. With an additional note: In a hot oven. Hot and cold. Another recipe, this on the funeral card of Jean, my fathers best friend: Funeral home: 10:10, Church 10:30, cemetery 11:15. My father must have thought that one short hour made for a quick end to the story of a life. In the bag I found, folded in four, a picture of a solder on a horse in the Algerian army, I have no idea what it meant in his eyes. I pulled out an odd little device that turned out to be the tool he used to regain strength in his hand after his stroke. It had two metal arms attached through a spring and you had to work to pull them together. I can see my father doing his exercises, repeated patiently, never falling into self pity, bringing that hand back to life to continue its work, an uncountable number of massages and one pull of the trigger. I pulled out one large key and a pile of letters from Crédit Agricole, one of my business cards and a receipt for a book on football. I'll stop there. We would have to decide later, my brothers and I, what to make of this cave of my father, living through his belongings.

CHAPTER 22

It was in 1989, in Cosne-sur-Loire. I had just published a book on farmers, the very type of field workers that you received, from time to time, on your massage table. I had been invited to read in this small bookstore; sitting next to me was Jules Roy (a French writer and Pied-Noir, meaning he was white but lived in Algeria before independence), so full of Algeria and Algiers, with hair white as snow. He was somber and olive skinned, and welcomed me with warmth, the child of North Africa that I was, and he reminded me of you in ways that I could not describe, a softness perhaps in his look and in his voice, like Mouloudji (a French singer of Algerian descent).

Sometimes I see all three of you together, Jules Roy singing of Algeria, and Mouloudj speaking of wars that he will not fight. You, you stay silent, present in your silence, your look enveloping without touching, touching without possessing, leaving me free to live my life. And yet, waking me and reminding me that you are dead, I have this terrible feeling that I am the one who doesn't exist, that all the years have fallen to dust, that there's nothing worth living for except the memory of what we were.

CHAPTER 23

In the kitchen, sitting on a chair at the table, I found Le Monde that had been placed there early in the morning along with the fresh bread that was on the table. My father rarely opened a paper, and read one even less often, wanting to keep the chaos of the world at bay. But he knew that, with a son just starting out in the world, a son whose dreams of being a cyclist he had always encouraged, he had to encourage curiosity, knowledge of the world. That's how, in 1979, I gave up my dreams of the maillot jaune and my physical therapy training, and I dove head first into constitutional law and political economy, spending the hours that I used to be on my bicycle instead reading thick text books. My friends at school read Le Monde, Le Matin de Paris, Le Nouvel Observateur, and they were well ahead of me who had only read monthly cycling magazines. While I was making up my handicap I read twice as much as everyone else to open my spirit and my mind, to build a more complete academic culture. My father, without using any words, gave me the final push in his own way, silently. Le Monde sitting there that morning on my chair at the table was his contribution to my awakening to the ways of the world. That year I learned the significance of the word Shiite during the Iranian revolution. I understood that the French business was dependent on Korean factories. I read, cut out and pasted articles, using paste to make sure the articles stuck. I underlined and highlighted, took diligent notes. I always had black ink on the ends of my fingers, as though I had always just put back on a bicycle chain. That newspaper quickly became my newspaper, brought every day by the discrete and firm hand of my father, the man who had made everything possible.
I can see his smile, his child-like glee, when he read, for the first time, my name, his own, in Le Monde, in November 1981.

CHAPTER 24

In the back of my father's garden, nearly hidden by spider webs, sits a little brick shack on the brink of falling apart. In that shack, hanging on the wall, I found my old racing bicycle. Red frame, yellow joints, Cinelli handle bars, the paint peeling like an old snake skin. I took it down and held it up, ignoring the nettles stinging my ankles. The wheels turned without a squeak, making that little metallic music. Memories of nights in the velodrome flowed back, sack lunches and mulled wine, races all over France and always my father standing at the top of the hills, sometimes worried, sometimes confident, always silent, excepting his look, mostly don't take yourself out on the downhills, use your breaks. At night in the house, it was on this bike that I rode like a daemon with the rear wheel placed in a home-trainer. My mother worried, but my father reassured her : I was only moving my legs to learn to go fast.

Natalie and I opened the windows of his house for the first time and I lingered over the objects he left behind. On a desk, pictures of me and my brothers, some passport pictures of my father, other polaroids of our days as a family, Francois, Jean, my mother and me. There was his dog Phastas, whose photo was in a glass frame, an honor which no one in his family held. My hands moved in near darkness, and what a sudden emotion, in the calm of the house as a ray of sun broke through the clouds and illuminated the steel of my old miniature bicycles, that made the bottom fall from my stomach. There is my father coming through the door as he came home from work asking, "Who's winning?" and being careful to avoid stepping on my toy bikes as he came across the room. I had no idea they were still there, these witnesses of my childhood, cold to the couch, and a portal to my memory. A scene from the film Amelie springs to me mind; a man has a box returned to him that is full of his childhood toys. A character says that love is like the Tour de France, you wait for ages and then it passes in a second. It doesn't take much to make it come back, a splash of cold water, the red of your daughter's nail polish, the same color as Rick Van Loy's jersey, the blue sky in the Gan Mercier. It doesn't take anything but a roll of the dice on the black and white tiles of his old house and everything starts again, but only in memory.

I took back my treasures. My legs itched from the nettles in the garden. A wave of happiness hit me before the shadow could cover my joy: I am in this house because my father is dead, and each time I feel light or my breathing comes too easily, this thought hits me.

I found a book written by my friend Erik Orsenna, dedicated "to Michel, with my affection." The book is called Deep Love. It's a title that fit us, you and me, well.

I also found a ticket to a Rochelle Rupella game, which cost 50 Francs; was this for a basketball game? On the back there was an advertisement from a local bar offering a free beer in exchange for a ticket stub. I try to imagine my father going to a basketball game and then going out drinking with his friends after. He liked neither basketball or hanging around in bars and so this paper sitting between my fingers seems like a small mystery of unknown importance hidden right there in the middle of his nightstand amongst pictures of his father, his children and his dogs.

It seems as though one of his patients gave him books which he took great care never to open. These small discoveries put a smile on my face. And what if he just knew how to hide his secrets, what if he was actually a voracious reader, filling his head with knowledge and words. My mood is a bit lighter today. It's because I am not alone. Natalie's footsteps were reassuring behind me.

I page through his books trying, in vain, to find some sign from him. Nothing, and yet, something. I learned that he loved Comment Wang-Fo fut Sauve, the tale by Yourcenar. Maybe he recognized himself in the old painter that walked through life with little on his back because he preferred painting things rather than owning things. From Yourcenar to Jules Renard, I find this quote, "And if only those who wanted to commit suicide could only be happy with destroying their picture!" Here the photos of my father are intact, behind glass, capturing his look, visibly surprised by the flash, sometimes shy, other times smiling, gone regardless.

Before leaving and closing up the house, before finding in a closet a football jersey from when he still played defense, before noticing, in his old office, a cat-door cut into his window shutters, before seeing that clock on his table still ticking away the seconds, before saying goodbye, before all that, I took his gold plaque that read physical therapist, I turned it over after reading his name, my own, in vaguely green lettering; it felt in my hand like it were on fire and I wanted to stomp that fire out, but it was just a metal plaque sitting there in my hand, valiant and cold.

We don't really know what to do with that plaque, my brothers and me.

I thought that he must have taken it down himself. And I feel like I am the one who finds himself, in the end, erasing his name, the same one he gave to me. I still hear that name and it resonates as though it were the first time. At first when some one asked me my name I would hesitate. I was embarrassed and proud at the same time, proud of that name, but worried that a voice would rise up and shout : Liar!

Chapter 25

I had never stopped there. I always drove quickly past, keeping my eyes on the road, daring only a glance out of the corner of my eye without slowing. This time, coming back from La Rochelle, alone, I drove again past the parking lot where my father killed himself. I pulled up slowly, taking in the physical place in the silence of a summer evening. Almost no traffic. I stopped my car halfway up the ramp. Did he look around? Did he see the cell antenae looming across the street? Or did he see nothing, caught up in the details of his task, being sure not to miss, this man who had organized everything including a piece of paper he left next to him with the telephone number to call, informing us that everything was over.

Should I say that it had been a car accident, as he hinted in one of his letters? Honestly, the thought never crossed my mind. Everything ends as it had began, or nearly. In the winter of 1968 my mother's best friend, Jacqueline, drove me to her family's house for a short vacation. At an intersection on the way a car ran a red light and nearly killed Jacqueline, a true sister for my mother. Broken hips and legs, badly burnt, in a coma for a long time, Jacqueline was between death and life. I got out with only cuts and bruises, beat up but ok, stuck in the middle of the wreckage. Later, Jacqueline would come back to life. Little by little she would regain movement in her limbs, then take a few cautious steps, at first with difficulty, later stronger and stronger. After several operations she was left under the care of a young physical therapist in Bordeaux, a pied-noir named Michel Fottorino. One day she told my mother that her physical therapist was such a good man, kind and warm and handsome. What would he have become, Papa, without that horrible accident in which I was nothing but a shadow, before you gave me the lead role, that of a son pulled from the wreckage.

I restarted the car. I don't think I can stop here, it's useless. No, it wasn't a car accident that killed my father. My father was a good driver, calm and slow. I remember that he knew some roads like the back of his hand and, at night, would turn off his headlights as he approached an intersection and see if other cars were approaching. If no other lights approached in the darkness, he drove on without lights and we had a few fleeting moments suspended in the darkness. It was, without a doubt, reckless, but he could feel the road beneath us, and was only imitating, without a doubt, his father on his long drives on the roads of southern Tunisia, his lights turned off to hide from sniper's bullets.

CHAPTER 26

One night after dinner Nicole gave me my father's two racing bicycles, one of which I recognized, bright red with leather straps on the pedals and large handlebars to keep the chest open. I didn't recognize the other bike. It was more modern, better equipped, with racing tires, automatic pedals, and a deep blue color. This is the bike that he rode up to the end of his life, biking hard into the wind, putting in all his force trying to make his heart go naturally. A beautiful death, like a sailor who disappeared at sea. But his heart was too strong. At night I find myself facing his two bikes and I promise to take them out riding. I feel ridiculous on these bikes that knew no one but my father, his hands, his breath, his way of pedaling. For now they sit in my garage untouched. I put them one next to the other, close to my old racing bicycle, foot soldiers in a dead army longing to come back to life.

In the twilight late one evening I find that Nicole had dropped off a folder full of my father's documents. Passport, untouched by stamps from foreign lands, a professional certificate from 1969 on which I recognize a younger version of his face, the man who adopted me, and newer photos of him.

Amongst all these documents there's a paper from another time, yellowed with age, with his name in all capitals. It says: War Ministry. Military records. 1957.

Never seen, never read, I've only heard others, my aunts, about his time during the Algerian war. I page through this document. Unreadable notes from superior officers. Names of cities: Nimes, Frejus, Tunis, Dax. Then some notes: comemorative medal for security operations and order kept in AFN (North Africa). A few lines from a military citation: "on June 7 1958 in the south west of Tagma, volunteered for a mission into territory occupied by the rebells at great risk of exposure to chemical weaponry. Did not return until was absolutely necessary, another example of his courage and cold blood." A note from a commanding general about his bronze star. I remember one day when my father learned that the cyclist Marcel Tinazzi was from Tlemcen, my father repeated the name of the town joyously, like a cymbal crash from his youth that resonate in his mouth. Tlemcen! This name was unknown to me; he never spoke to me of his days in the service, certainly due to modesty as much as avoidance of a nauseating subject, this man who the war changed into an antimilitary activist. I could sense the echos of nerve gas in this book even. He must have had to retreat quickly from some of his missions after feeling the tingle of the gas. I wonder if he didn't volunteer for such missions in order to have it all be over, once and for all, at 20 years old. Almost 50 years later he wrote that he had had a date with death for many decades. Did he write the original contract in enemy territory outside of Tagma? I remember in the 70s the Serge Lama song about Algeria ("even with a gun in hand / it was a beautiful land") threw him into fits, he certainly did feel as though he were "playing soldier". Right before my eyes, written in pencil now fading, a permission for 21 days in Dax with his parents, signed the 20th of February 1960 by the colonel giving him the right to a military fare on the trains, 2nd class.

The 20th of February 1960. I would like to imagine him going to find my mother, already pregnant with me. That would be a beautiful story. I try to put back together the pieces of his emotions. He might even be asked to wait for a few months, until his own birthday the 30th of August, four days after my own. But I am rambling. In February 1960 my mother, pregnant, would be sent to the Alpes to distant cousins to hide her shame. My father, Jewish and Moroccan, would be removed from the situation. And my future father, Michel, had never heard of this young woman, and was already filled, who knows, with the idea of his own death.

I am with my family in my aunt Zoune's large living room, there with her husband Andre, my biggest fans in my days as a cyclist and my biggest support when, at 17, I became convinced that I had a terminal illness. I look through their immense library that takes up an entire wall, floor to ceiling. Novels, books on philosophy, essays on technology in society, guides on wine, on the Italian renaissance. It was here in this room that, amongst all these books, I learned to truly read. My father and I had stopped speaking. He felt powerless against my insanity that made me one morning throw a boiling cup of hot chocolate across the kitchen. This somber episode only brings up the even more somber thoughts of death, I hold onto certain words he uttered while trying to help me find the will to live. I remember that against my obsessions of death he put his own enthusiasm for life and confidence in the human body. "It takes a lot, you know, to kill a body. It's an incredible piece of equipment, made for the sole purpose of resisting." For him it took a bullet in the head.

We are in Zoune and Andre's living room with the lights dimmed because my brother Francois found old family films. We sat listening to the motor and the end of one reel hitting the projector with a clack-clack-clack; numbers were written on the outside of all the boxes, 1972, 1973, 1974. We were young, kids. We were all commenting, talking about images and memories, then we grew silent because my father appeared on the screen in a light suit, no belt around his waist, stomach still flat, svelte, with a wink for the camera. I was behind the camera. They scenes exist on my eye and to this day they still resurface, like the old black and white films in their silence, like from another life. Certain years appear to be missing, I can remember filming on the beach in Pontaillac in what must have been the summer of 1976. He was naked from the waist up, in swim trunks, and I can still hear the dull thwacking sound of his foot on a football. His footprints in the sand. I have always thought that my father is the type that would leave few marks after he left. Time always threatens to make you doubt that later it may seem as if he never existed. The absences may work to cut the lines that once existed to him. The days move forward and the gun shot feels more and more muffled. I cannot except this as an end to the story.

Before sleeping I opened, by chance, the novel Journal by Jules Renard and, by chance fell upon the scene where the main character's father shoots himself through the mouth. Could it just be coincidence? I read on, shocked, "He wouldn't leave us an image of himself as an old man, he had to kill himself while in perfect health, stronger than even me." And later, "He didn't kill himself because he suffered too much but because he couldn't live in anything but perfect health." And finally, "That little plastic shell is looking at me like his eye from the other side of the grave."

I close the book, anesthetized.

CHAPTER 27

Would I have been able to stop him? I think this question will always haunt me.

At night in December 2007 we were walking side by side in the dark. My daughter had a piano recital at a local church. Natalie and I came down to La Rochelle and we went to a restaurant afterwards. Papa seemed upset, I know that he sometimes didn't have enough money, but for the first time he asked me for a loan that I knew he wouldn't be able to repay. I reassured him, it wasn't a problem, we could eat out and I would pay, he had nothing to worry about. My wife, in the end, arranged for food to be delivered from the local bistro. Papa was relieved when he found out. But now, after dinner, he and I were walking side by side in the darkness. Nicole and Natalie were walking behind and the children had run ahead. All of a sudden I felt his arm on me, hard, like a runner stumbling towards the finish line. He quickened the pace. Why, all of a sudden, this agitation? He leaned over and whispered in my ear that he needed help paying for the tickets to the recital. I reassured him, told him he had nothing to worry about, I was worried about him and at the same time I wanted him to be in a place where he was independent and happy. In less than three months, he would have found a final solution.

Could I have stopped him? When he asked for my help I gave it to him without assumption. I knew he must have been broke. He didn't get any retirement, any medicade, for all that he would have had to pay his debts, fill out paperwork. Andre, Zoune's husband, with the help of his niece, was able to help him get a monthly allowance. What a relief! But it was the very day he killed himself and he knew nothing about it.

Eight days before his final day we drove down to La Rochelle and he came over for dinner. On the phone he said, embarrassed, that he couldn't repay me. I told him it didn't matter. I told myself that I would talk to him about it as soon as we had an opportunity, one on one. I wanted to offer to help him a little each month, but how would he take my offer, the man who could barely stand when he had to ask me, once, for money? I told my brother and Natalie about my plans. On that night he showed up, all smiles, breathing easily, a lightness about him; he had such joy in his face that I didn't have an opportunity to bring up my idea, such a delicate subject that would certainly have ruined his mood. Friends had come to eat with us. The conversation turned towards aging and retirement homes and how to ensure happy and comfortable ends of life for the very old. In retrospect this conversation seems troubling, even if I can no longer remember the exact details. My father sat there, as if not listening. I thought, after that night, that he was doing much better, and I enthusiastically told my brother, "He's fine!" We drove back to Paris and I didn't speak to my father again. He had convinced us that he was better, what an actor. We kissed goodbye, for the last time. I didn't know what his future held. He did.

Could I have stopped him? All of my friends, and all my family, simply say "No." In my heart I feel as though I could have, and this is terribly difficult to live with. I tell myself that if I had had more courage, was able to be more generous, if I had insisted on helping him, through his stubbornness, he might have put off his final gesture, the promise of an actual retirement would have stopped him from ending his life so quickly. The truth is that I'll never know. Something in me feels like it's come loose. I feel sad without sadness, lonely without being alone, happy without joy.

CHAPTER 28

WIthout a doubt I've relied too heavily on my writing. Through it I hoped to shed some light on your mystery. I was trying to understand the desire you had in you to die. And now I find myself at the end of this voyage and I have to admit: I didn't escape anything and I didn't clarify anything either.

The love that I will feel for you, forever, contrasts with the anger that I harbor for your final act. And this author has lost his favorite character.

We would have had to speak together. For a long time we hadn't spoken, not in the true sense of the word. We avoided subjects that could have created tension. We stayed on the surface of things where everything was simple, where there were no risks. We talked about the weather, not the time we had left together. Towards the end of my teenage years we argued once or twice about the death penalty - you were for, I against - or your use of parental authority, which was, from time to time, frustrating. You weren't always smooth, and in the end you and Mom ended in divorce. You were my hero with all your faults, more loving than you were gnawed in secret by impenetrable demons.

I ask myself if I ever knew you, if I ever understood you at all. From where did this death surge forth? In your family's car as it was driving away from you towards Gafsa? Outside of Tagma with a gun in your hand and toxic gas in the air? Other wounds, invisible but deep? There is everything we have said and all our silences that held us together. We protected one another, you by what you had given to me and me but what I had never asked of you. And then there were your hands forced into retirement, other people's pains that you couldn't cure, money problems: there was enough to push anyone into a corner. But was it all this, in the end, or something else that you kept hidden, a silent suffering that would never be uncovered? I can only respect your secrets. But I would have loved to understood them, to have had the chance to destroy them with our love.

Ok time for a science blog! YAY!

So in researching reading for the Imaging Life class that I will (YAY) be teaching this spring at the New School (tell your friends) I came across some pretty remarkable videos and images that I wanted to share. These, to me, are clear examples of the way in which biology and biologists can build instruments and take pictures that, beyond helping to divulge the inner secrets of cells and organisms, actually border on plain old art. As a structural biologist, a significant portion of my work involves what is a really fancy type of photography. It just so happens that we're attempting to take pictures of biological molecules on the atomic scale and that we have to use a particle accelerator to do so, but in so many ways the image that comes out is just another picture. It is simply another visual way we can make sense of the world. It's a portrait, just really really really zoomed in.

I'll start with a protein structure, very near and dear to my heart. A cell in your body is somewhere on the order of 20 micrometers, clearly visible using conventional light microscopy. Your average protein is somewhere on the scale of 2-10nm (the protein below is 5nm across). That means that an individual protein is some 10,000 times smaller than the average cell. In actuality, your cells are just packed full of these proteins; the proteins themselves perform all sorts of functions, catalyze chemical reactions, carry cargo from one end of the cell to another, provide structural support. Proteins are responsible for copying your DNA (your genetic material) each time your cells divide. They do all sorts of sweet shit.




This particular protein fold is called a beta-propeller, for obvious reasons. Its function is known but for now unimportant. I just think it looks sweet. The protein itself forms an extended barrel like shape with a hole in the center. If we zoom in, we can see individual atoms! WOW!




Now the cool thing about this is that in some instances individual atoms are crucial to really important things. Lots of drugs, like entire classes of anti-HIV drugs, have been designed to fit perfectly within the molecular structure of the protein they target. Without the picture of the protein, you're lost. So not only are these pictures pretty (thinks I at least) but they can actually be incredibly important when it comes to piecing together some of the most fundamental processes of cellular life.


Also, bacteria make a syringe (below) that injects your cells with proteins that reprogram it so the bacteria can invade! CRAZY!!!











Those pictures are cool and all but not really the point. Within the past few years a few groups throughout the world have been pushing the limits of what is possible to visualize using a microscope. So here we are back on the scale of several micrometers, visualizing whole cells. One technique in particular really blows my mind. Without getting into the details, let me just say that technique allows us to visualize, really for the first time, embryos as they develop for extremely long periods of time. It allows us to track individual cells and their fates. It may ultimately help us understand how we develop from a tiny little sack of a few thousand cells into a functional organism. And it produces some sweet fucking videos.






This is a video of a zebrafish embryo as it develops. Each cell is individually labeled.




This video is pretty sweet too. Because this microscope constantly scans through the sample you end up getting a 3-D representation of each cell at each time point. This means you can reconstruct the view from any angle you want, changing your point of view at will. Here 4 different views of the embryo are shown. It's absolutely remarkable that the cells divide and divide and then, in such a coordinated fashion, move explosively to different poles of the embryo. A lot of these processes are still poorly understood, but these videos make the entire process seem, in a way, magical, and larger than life.

That's all for now from here in science land. Hopefully some day I'll make pictures and or movies like these. I promise as soon as we publish my protein structure I'll post it on here. And like explain what it means and everything. Sweet.

Newark Police Shooting

Today is going to be a shorter post mostly because I am generally having a shitty day at work.

I would like to briefly discuss the recent shooting of an unarmed man by a police department in the New York metro area. Sound familiar to anyone?

This particular case occurred in Newark, NJ and must be contextualized by the fact that violent crime is prevalent in Newark and that in the past month the Newark PD has shot 5 people.

Today the prosecutors announced the details of the shooting from the point of view of the police officer, who is also the scene's only witness. One DeFarra Gaymon, it would seem, was caught masturbating in a public park in Newark known to be a gay pick up spot. He became aggressive when cornered. The officer felt threatened, Mr. Gaymon apparently "lunged" toward the officer in an attempt to disarm him and the officer fired, killing Mr. Gaymon.

As today's New York Times article states, many questions remain (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/nyregion/21newark.html?ref=nyregion). The officer was only questioned about the fatal shooting more than 3 days later. He, apparently, was receiving treatment for "trauma" although other sources claim he was uninjured in the incident. The larger question remains why the officer, who is not being named due to his "undercover work," was by himself in the park in the first place. Apparently he lost his handcuffs in the pursuit of another man who was arrested and went back, alone, to retrieve them. This is when he was supposedly accosted and threatened by Mr. Gaymon and when he, ultimately, took this man's life.

Beyond the question of whether an urban police force should be prioritizing the criminalization of gay sex in public as opposed to, say tackling violent crime, beyond the question of why lethal force is ever used against an unarmed citizen, above and beyond the fact that, yet again, an undercover, plain clothes police officer has taken the life of another black man, one must ask can we even believe the story being put forward at the minute? And even if we can, does that justify such a drastic use of force?

My answer to both questions is clearly no. Police officers lie all the damn time to protect their own interests. Remember this story from last week when a cop was videoed approaching and then knocking a cyclist off his bicycle? The cop arrested the cyclist claiming that the cyclist had taken aim at him and attempted to knock him over. If it weren't for the video of the scene, one could have never questioned the validity of that story.

But above and beyond the fact that this officer was given several days to reflect on his version of the incident, the fact remains that lethal force was used against an unarmed man. Surely this is something that we cannot accept. Whether or not he was guilty of soliciting sex in a park, the cost of a life is far too heavy a price to pay. Are police officers not trained in non-lethal methods for disarming a combative citizen? Certainly, given the outcomes of past high-profile police violence trials, they must feel as though their actions, almost no matter how brazen, are likely to go unpunished. Or did this officer also think that he was grabbing his taser? It is time that we demand more transparency from our police force. A first step would be holding them accountable for their actions the same way we would anyone else who has taken a human life.

The Real Roots of White Anxiety: White people versus white people

So let me get this off my chest. I hate White People.

You can probably tell by my profile picture that I am, in fact, a white person.

People have read the first line, seen the color of my skin, and assumed that they are dealing with white guilt, a form of self-hatred that has to do with my feelings about my personal role in our collective past. This is not, I hope, the case. I have been more often accused of having an over-developed sense of self-esteem, and I think that this may be somewhat closer to the truth. I do not hate myself, or my family, or the legions of poor white people around whom I grew up. I love all those people, I understand them and see them as whole human beings well worthy of compassion and respect. But that doesn't change the fact that I hate White People.

As you may have guessed by now, I would like to draw a distinction between White People and white people. The proper noun describes a societal trend, a norm that has been created in the west and perpetuated throughout the world to the great detriment of anyone who has found themselves outside of this norm. White People owned slaves. White People colonized West Africa, South America, "French Indochina" and Ireland for that matter. White People owned properties and businesses that passed wealth from White People to White People. Later, White People colonized suburbs, and today they are recolonizing the inner city.

These types of groups can be challenging to define. I will, inevitably, fall into some traps and create some broad generalizations that may be unfair. Nevertheless, onward I write. The way we have conceptualized White People in this country has shifted over the past century. America, in her early days, really only considered male protestants White people; they had the wealth, the political power, and the ability to craft the entirety of our early history. As we pressed on in the 20th century, with the influx of so many European immigrants, this definition began to shift. Catholics from Ireland (my own personal history) were not, at first, considered White People, although based solely upon the color of our skin we certainly were white. Catholics lived, largely, in poverty, were discriminated against in the job and housing markets, and had little political power outside of certain municipalities.

However, there was a shift some time in the 20th century when many of these working class white groups were allowed to buy into the system of the Whites. The middle class expanded in the post World War II economy, manufacturing jobs started paying something that bordered on a working wage, and many families had the ability to climb up the social ladder.

My own family was one of them. My grandparents were both born of modest means and through hard work managed to land themselves solidly in the middle class. Perhaps even the upper middle class. Ah yes, the American Dream. Unfortunately it is not quite this simple. My grandparents benefited from many privileges (ah yes, the dreaded word) that were systemically denied to entire classes of people. It just so happened that Irish Catholic had become permissibly White, so entrance to jobs and restaurants, houses and country clubs, and college for their children, were all relatively commonplace. What was once white had become White; my family had bought into a system of upper middle class suburban largesse that simply could not have existed without the systemic exclusion of others, the non-Whites.

Now I do not mean to imply that this was the case for all whites. Nor do I mean to downplay the obvious systemic oppression that occurred because of the nuclear family and the new 20th century middle class (feminism was a welcome voice, although overwhelmingly White).

I add this because the rural pacific northwest, where is spent the first 18 years of my life, is full of working class white people. My home town, to cite a specific example, employed people in three main industries: logging, small-scale farming, and light manufacturing. Needless to say, due to globalization and tighter governmental oversight (remember the spotted owl controversy of the 1990s?) these are all industries that have taken major hits in the past few decades. Families that were managing, barely, to scrape by a living doing tough work and getting paid only meagre wages lost their livelihoods.

White anger comes from some place. Working class whites have, like working class blacks and working class latinos, been given a raw deal.

Now this doesn't erase the reality of White privilege, of which I am a living, breathing example. I come from such a place, I attended failing public schools and I was terribly underprepared when I arrived at college. But because I look like a White kid from an east coast prep school, and because I have learned to speak properly, I have the ability to fit into that role when necessary. Certain doors have doubtlessly opened for me based upon my ability to appear, if not feel, White. And this is the inherent difference between working class white people and people of color. We white people can shed our working class roots, we can become, if you will, White; people will not constantly be questioning whether we are in our job because of affirmative action. We are less likely to be denied tenure, for example, and more likely to be hired (Jamaal still receives fewer interviews than John when they have the same CV).

So we are stuck in a bit of a catch-22. Poor white people are angry, and rightfully so. However, part of this anger is the accusation that they have some sort of privilege based upon the color of their skin. White skin privilege won't buy dinner when you lose your job. But it, nevertheless, is real and contributes to the social mobility, generationally, of white (or White) people.

As I was writing this humble blog an article was posted in the NyTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/opinion/19douthat.html) about white anger and began by "recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right" when he talked about the White Male being the most persecuted man in America. This is an impossible way to start this discussion. Pat Buchanan is talking about White people, whom he thinks are superior to all the recent interlopers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfoUuOwAaIc&feature=related). This grandson of a confederate soldier would like to return to a century's old definition of White people. He is not talking about class anger, really, but is talking from a place where he thinks white people are simply smarter and more hard working than other types of people. Pat Buchanan didn't, ever, not once, get anything right.

White anger is different from white anger. White anger comes from a privilege that has been slowly eroded and a desire to return to a time when only White people were admitted into the upper ranks of society. On the other hand white anger comes from genuine social and economic disenfranchisement and is justified and understandable. What is unfortunate is that we have let those people who only want to discuss White anger take over the conversation. This serves only to drive people with shared economic interests apart: black people distrust racist working class whites, and working class whites believe that blacks and immigrants are stealing their jobs.

The importance of viewing the situation through both the lenses of race and class has become absolutely critical. Working class whites have too long been vilified and they have too long allowed themselves to be manipulated by the "populist" forces of the fringe right wing. The working class Tea Party-ers (as there are many middle and upper-middle class Tea Party-ers who, at least, have their economic interests at heart in their fight for laissez-faire government) have genuine gripes and mocking their anti-intellectualism will not change the reality of their situation. Certainly the answer is not smaller government and weaker gun laws, but understanding the real roots of white anxiety, and White anxiety, will be important factors in combating both of them.

Damn You Tim Wilson

Those of you who know me well know a couple of things about how I approach summer. First, my work load doubles. My school, Rockefeller, only has a graduate program in the biological sciences. The result is that we have no students to teach for much of the year. However, in the summer we get a fresh crop of 20 or so gung-ho undergrads ready to pipette their way to greatness. Or maybe, hopefully, to get a PCR or two to work. These students work in a lab and take have a formal journal club. Typically, I take a student to work with me in the lab and help teach the journal club. This year I've taken two in the lab. And am helping to teach the journal club. And I haven't had a decent result in a few months. And I'm officially nearly a 5th-year grad student. So yes, during the summers I tend to work harder than I do during the year, between the teaching and the typical lab work. And this year I feel pressed to work even more since I should be, you know, graduating at some point in the not so distant future.

The second point is that I love summer. I love the NYC beaches, the free concerts, biking around (sweat and all). I even love it when it's too damn hot. People walk around with a special glow and a little extra sympathy for those around them. It's something we all are going through together. And it makes for instant small talk, which everyone knows I enjoy. "Hot today, no?" I love outdoor drinking. I appreciate that the sun stays with us until 10pm. The summer is an excuse to do some sweet shit. And I want to do it all.

So yes, in the summer I am busy. But lately I've been feeling as though I am leaving my intellectual development a little to the side. My new franco-friend Tim Wilson is currently doing a "I'm-going-to-write-everyday-and-post-it-on-my-blog" thing, which I did ages ago and enjoyed. I am going to try to do the same for a week and see how it goes. Now Tim writes blogs that are awesome and smart about shit like French books and stuff. I just want to put out there some things I've had on my mind for a while, maybe some stuff on race and class (white people versus White people), some stuff about philanthropy (and why it's evil), some stuff on politics (of course) and even some stuff (god forbid) about science.

Let the great adventure begin.

Or, sick it Tim WIlson.

Interesting things happen when you are a self described socialist and you attend the Rockefeller University. That's right, the Rockefeller University. Whether or not you've heard of it is, for once, irrelevant. The name is all the information you need. Yes, it's the Rockefellers, like the Center, like Chase Manhattan Bank, with its connections to the world bank and beyond; the Rockefellers, who made their money breaking every anti-trust law possible and yet have the fucking balls to have an 'informative' board just inside the main door to the school entitled 'The Art of Getting and the Art of Giving'. Yes, my education is being funded by the union-breaking-blood-money of one of our nations most famous and infamous families, and I understand the precarious place that places my politics around here.

Additionally, the Rockefeller Family has had an illustrious relationship with the Kissinger family. Who convinced the US government to let the Shah of Iran come into the country for medical treatment but David D. Rockefeller (who will one day, God willing, hand me my doctoral diploma) and Henry A. Kissinger. And none other than Nancy Kissinger, the good Doctor's wife, is a longstanding member of the Rockefeller board. The Kissingers are, from my understanding, consistently the largest donors to the Rockefeller graduate school.

It should not be shocking, therefore, that Henry Kissinger would be invited to Rockefeller to speak. It should also not be surprising that I would be entirely disgusted by one of the 20th century's most notorious war criminals (arguments to follow) would be invited to speak at my institution of higher education. I am all for freedom of speech, but can we not draw the line at inviting a man with this much blood on his hands to campus? And now that the truth about his policies and, from an international law point of view, crimes has largely been revealed, why are we taking anything this man has to say about policy decisions seriously?

Just a quick reminder of some of Kissinger's accomplishments, feel free to skip this section if you already know or simply don't care (although you fucking should care):

Under Nixon, Kissinger was the chief architect of the war in South East Asia. It should be stated that he was widely credited with halting the talks that could have ended the war in 1968 to help ensure that Nixon would ultimately be elected. Kissinger orchestrated the bombing of Cambodia that was almost certainly illegal under international law and that killed some where on the order of 600,000 civilians. He was also involved in the mass bombing campaigns in Vietnam and the use of defoliating chemicals, such as agent orange, that had an unspeakable impact on the civilian population of the region.

Kissinger is also reported to have given tacit approval for Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. What is known, however, is that due to President Ford and Kissinger's policies, the weapons that the Indonesian government needed to pursue their policy were supplied by the US, even though the White House knew the weapons would not be used in accordance with international law. East Timor was brutally occupied until 1999 when the Clinton administration ceased the military aid that Indonesia required and an international peace keeping force was installed. The reports of deaths range from the tens to hundreds of thousands East Timorese, again killed with weapons supplied by the US.

Finally, the case where Kissinger has actually received the most attention from courts at home and abroad. In 1973 the Chilean military, led by Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile. The US, under Nixon with Kissinger as Secretary of State, had worried that the socialist government of Allende in Chile put American interests at risk. While the American role in the coup is still debated, Kissinger himself admits to "help(ing) them" and "creat(ing) the conditions as great as possible". In the violence that followed the coup, many loyal to Allende were tortured and killed. The governments of France, Spain, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, and several US based civil cases, have sought to question Kissinger under oath about his involvement in this coup. He has patently refused all questioning.

So yeah, Kissinger, in my eyes, is a pretty bad dude. Whether or not you agree that communism was a major problem that had to be defeated in the early 1970s, I hope we can all agree that orchestrating a bombing spree that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians simply cannot be justified. And yet, this man, who willingly flaunted international law, not only walks free but is still an advisor to major policy makers, and is still invited to give distinguished lectures at prestigious universities.

So naturally my cute little socialist ass wants to get my rabble rouse on and, because we cannot stop him from coming to campus, at least make it known that there are sections of our community who do not approve of Dr. Kissinger, not one bit. Turns out there is a section of the community, and it consists of about six people.

We organized, and we fliered, and we argued, and he came. Turns out Dr. Kissinger didn't come to talk, but rather to be interviewed. And who better to interview him than his very own former PhD student and modern day sycophant Leslie Gelb. Kissinger was welcomed by the introduction, "Whether you agree with him or not, you must admit that Kissinger is one of the great minds of the 20th century." Clearly no opposing views would be proposed, or difficult questions asked. Kissinger talked for under an hour largely about Chinese intentions and the situation in the middle east. Much of what he said seemed partially credible. His slow, accented speech and subtle wit certainly endeared him to the majority of the crowd. At times it was difficult to remember the larger than life crimes this man is accused of committing with the use of his pen on paper. Is this short, heavy, cute old man really the embodiment of evil that he is reported to be.

Yes.

I woke up when he was talking about Iran. He said that, contrary to popular belief, the US and Iran weren't always at odds. We got along just fine, he said, when the Shah was in power. Well yes, Henry, we did. But of course we did, since he was our despotic puppet. And the CIA was directly involved in the coup that placed him in power, overthrowing the democratically elected government that wanted to use Iranian resources for.... IRANIANS. And the Shah was not terribly popular, to say the least, and was overthrown in 1979 leading to the government that now exists. So yes, we got along great with Iran as long as we, and not the people of Iran, were governing.

Then the rest of the talk came back to me, the cute quips fell away, the old body stopped instilling sympathy. US as the indispensable force. US interests trump any other consideration. China seen through the lens of US hegemony. Dido the middle east. What an oppressive and historically dangerous world view! Yes, Kissinger is a man who can, and has, put US interests above the lives of hundreds of thousand of civilians.

I will skip over the question and answer section, and the deference exhibited by the audience. I want to move on to my dinner with the war criminal.

At these lectures students and postdoctoral fellows along with members of the board and professors, are invited to dine with the speaker and continue the discussion in a less formal setting. Because I am always in front of my email and respond in t-minus 2 seconds, i often get to attend these dinners. They can be interesting and intimate, a chance to ask questions of some of the great thinkers in our country. I do not consider Henry Kissinger a great mind. After the lecture I had had just about enough, and I didn't want to go to dinner. I was convinced by a faculty member, also attending, who encouraged me to ask a tough question.

Kissinger is, thank God, not at my table. Given his generous giving to our institution and his wife's membership on the board, me throwing food at him and attempting a citizens arrest would probably not have gone down too well. We eat, we argue amongst ourselves about the role of the US as the world's supreme power (why is it so hard for Americans to understand that this immediately subjugates other countries to secondary roles and is inherently oppressive?!?!?! come on folks!). And then the questioning beings again. Again complete deference to this man who certainly MUST be posed one uncomfortable question.

I raise my hand. I decided not to ask about the moral minefield that is South East Asia, although I consider it likely the most interesting and pertinent topic. Instead I ask if, as Christopher Hitchens postulates, the arrest of Pinochet in Spain made Kissinger worried that scrutiny would reveal potential breaches of international law in his conduct and why he had thus far refused to answer questions posed by justices in France and Spain regarding the Chile coup.

Kissinger did not like my question. He seemed not to understand. He looked to the moderator. He ranted a bit about Hitchens, called much of his book a fabrication. He asked what specifically I was asking about and I said the charge that the US provided material support to the military insurgents in Chile both before and after the coup. He went into his talking point on this question, that he was involved early on in 1970 but had no involvement, direct or indirect, in the coup. This is at least partially contradicted by unclassified documents in which he and Nixon discuss the situation.

Kissinger then looks at me, argues that a civil discussion can be had about whether the right policies were enacted in Chile, but it is not a criminal matter. Never mind international law. Never mind foreign justice systems investigating the legality of the US role. Never mind the transcripts that include talk of 'neutralizing' a Chilean general unwilling to go along with the military take over.

Then the best bit. Kissinger looks at me. Tells me if i do any research on my own I would see the truth, and not what Christopher Hitchens says is the truth (never mind the declassified documents), and tells me that I've basically asked an insulting question and he doesn't have time to go into it any further.

If I made a few moments of Henry Kissinger's life unpleasant, maybe the day wasn't a total loss.

Reflections on Henry Kissinger

Tuesday January 19, 2010 6pm Caspary Auditorium Rockefeller University

Henry Kissinger is one of the most well-known and controversial diplomats of the 20^th century. Given his invitation to speak here at Rockefeller it is important to carefully consider his record. Several works discuss the merits and controversies surrounding Dr. Kissinger; his most infamous policy decisions were briefly discussed in The Nation magazine upon his appointment to the 9/11 commission (1):

Vietnam. Kissinger helped to undermine the 1968 Paris peace talks in order to assist Richard Nixon's presidential campaign. Kissinger and Anna Chennault, another Nixon supporter, urged the South Vietnamese government to not agree to a peace treaty while the Democrats were in power in the U.S., suggesting that they would "get a better deal" with Nixon, if he won election. President Thieu of South Vietnam complied.

Once in office, Nixon named Kissinger his national security adviser, and later appointed him secretary of state. As co-architect of Nixon's war in Vietnam, Kissinger oversaw the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, an illegal operation (listed in the Articles of Impeachment drawn up during Watergate) estimated to have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Kissinger was later awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a peace treaty with North Vietnam whose parameters were very similar to the one he helped scuttle a few years before. Around half of the total American casualties in Vietnam occurred between the sabotaged 1968 effort and the final 1973 treaty.

This incident, while seemingly incredible, is confirmed independently in both the diaries of Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman and in former Sec. of Defense Clark Clifford's memoir "Council to the President."

Chile. In November 1970, Kissinger authored NSC Memorandum 93, making it the goal of the United States to topple the socialist but democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende. Kissinger commented that " The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves ..." (Foreign Affairs, January 1975.)

Following Kissinger's direction, the CIA undertook to destabilize Chile's poor and fragile economy, as well to actively encourage and support military leaders considering a coup, including the alleged assassination of a ranking general loyal to Allende and the constitution (2). On Sept 11, 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a successful coup, resulting in Allende's death. Pinochet lead the repressive military junta until 1990. In 1998 Pinochet was arrested in England on war crimes charges, but released in 2000 for health reasons. After his return to Chile, he was indicted for several crimes, but died before trial.

East Timor. In 1975, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger, still serving as secretary of state, offered advance approval of Indonesia's brutal invasion of East Timor, which took the lives of tens of thousands of East Timorese. Indonesian troops held East Timor using weapons provided by the American government, even though, according to White House documents, Kissinger understood that the weapons being provided would not be used in accordance with international law (3). Indonesia occupied East Timor until the Clinton administration ended the military aid, originally set up under Ford and Kissinger, in 1999.

For these incidents, especially those involving the Allende coup in Chile, Kissinger has been sought by the justice systems in several countries, including France (4), Spain (5), Chile (6) and Argentina (7) and he has been sued in US courts (3, 8-9).

Sources:

1. Corn, David. Kissinger’s back as a 9/11 Truth-Seeker, The Nation, (2002). http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames/176/kissinger_s_back_as_9_11_truth_seeker

2. National Security Archive. East Timor Revisited. (2001) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/

3. Schneider v. Kissinger. (2006). http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/2005/0responses/2005-0743.resp.html

4. Trean, Claire. Henry Kissinger rattrapé au Ritz, à Paris, par les fantômes du plan Condor. Le Monde, (2001).

5. BBC. Spanish judge targets Kissinger. (2002). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1937000.stm

6. Harnden, Toby. US angry as Chile asks Kissinger about death. Telegraph, (2001). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1336058/US-angry-as-Chile-asks-Kissinger-about-death.html

7. Human Rights Watch. Argentina. (2001) http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/americas1.html

8. The Guardian. Kissinger sued over Chile death (2001). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/12/2

9. Center for Constitutional Rights. Horman v. Kissinger. http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/past-cases/horman-v.-kissinger