I drew the world from memory, I wonder how many countries I would leave out. I don’t like the one they imposed on me, and yet I cannot imagine bearing a name besides my own. On a map I have an easier time picking out the American states than the African countries. I have made love to roughly fifty women, I wonder if that’s a few or a lot. I have loved six women, four of them I told. I have cheated on a school exam. One night I went to a gay bar, where I stalked the back room, insatiably curious. I go to the pool in my neighborhood, I do not go to the pool when I am out of town. I have inherited lots of furniture that I didn’t keep, I sold it, I have bought a sofa, I requisitioned some school chairs from the Cité Internationale one night with Yan Toma, I built one table, I bought another, I found a third one in the street, I replaced my bed with a mattress on the floor. I have kept, of the objects given to me by my family, only a few family portraits, some landscapes, a death’s head, some taxidermy, some sculpture, a wooden pillar, a hunting rifle, some china, glasses, silverware, and a few bibelots, I don’t keep the m in my house, most are in a basement, I wouldn’t miss them if I knew they stopped belonging to me. I can remember so well, years later, the face of someone I met only once that it can be awkward if the person remembers less of me than I do of him. I have sometimes asked the same question of someone several times, if the answer didn’t interest me enough to remember it, it’s only at the moment of hearing the answer that I remember having already asked. On the phone I find silence embarrassing. I want this epitaph engraved on my tombstone: “See you soon.” The last time I learned something by heart was for a movie shoot and, before that, for a video, otherwise I have not learned anything by heart since I was in school. I write less easily at a round table, where my elbows hang in the void, than at a rectangular table, where they can bear my weight. For two years I painted round paintings that I did not show, soon afterward I stopped painting, since then looking at round paintings has made me sad. I do not take family photos, though I enjoy looking at the albums that my mother made when I was a child. I do not buy spiral notebooks because it is hard to write on the left-hand page, especially as your hand approaches the metal. When I was a child I once churned my yoghurt so hard with my spoon that it spattered all over the walls, my grandmother, usually so gentle, gave me a slap that left me stunned. When I was a child my mother sometimes called me Edouard the Stick ( le bâton ) because in the country I went around everywhere with a piece of wood, later, when I became a troublemaker, she called me the Tiresome Stick ( le bâton merdeux ), then, more simply, the Shit ( la merde ). I write more easily at night than in the daytime, until suddenly I realize it’s over, exhaustion overwhelms me, I turn off the computer and go to bed. I connect easily with women, it takes longer with men. My best male friends have something feminine about them. I ride a motorcycle but I don’t have the “biker spirit.” I get bored as soon as a motorcyclist starts talking to me about technical things having to do with the engine, cylinders, speed, or mileage. I am an egoist despite myself, I cannot even conceive of being altruistic. My brother had two childhood friends, they were all about five years old, and he met them again when he was forty-five in Nice, where all three of them now live. I have no friends from my childhood. When I was a child, then a teenager, I had one best friend for two or three years, then another, and so on, I never kept a best friend more than four years, I was almost twenty before I had friends who lasted longer, and almost thirty before I met the friends I have now. I have been more faithful in friendship than in love, which isn’t to say that I cheated on the women I was with, but that
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