The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun

Introduction

Sébastien Japrisot liked to break mirrors. The French novelist created characters that don’t recognise themselves. They are amnesiacs, dupes and doppelgängers, they are the deluded and deceived. ‘She was living, fully awake, in a dream,’ observes one. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying half the time,’ confesses another. Hoodwinking the reader is one thing but keeping one’s narrator in the dark is a trickier sleight of hand. Welcome to Japrisot’s opaque world.

Like many British readers, I discovered the author through the English translation of his 1991 anti-war classic, A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles). It’s a rare novel that manages to be – simultaneously – a gripping detective story, a relentless account of the horrors of the First World War and an exploration of the notion of evidence. It is also a great love story.

The novel’s heroine, Mathilde Donnay, is a typical Japrisot creation. Searching for her lost fiancé, presumed killed on the Western Front, the irrepressible Mathilde investigates events in the trenches, analysing the subjective accounts of witnesses and the equally unreliable official reports. It’s a jigsaw puzzle. As with much of Japrisot’s writing, the narrative is shaped by providence. ‘Once upon a time there were five French soldiers who had gone off to war,’ reads the opening line. ‘Because that’s the way of the world.’

The way of the world, in all its tragic and hopeful guises, was to be the author’s preoccupation throughout a prolific and varied career – one that spanned literary fiction, crime novels, screenplays and translations, right up to his death in March 2003. He had a Graham Greene-like reputation in France: a brilliant talent cocooned in a complicated and volatile personality. However, on this side of the Channel, he has remained relatively obscure to all but Francophiles and cineastes.

Japrisot was born Jean-Baptiste Rossi in Marseille in 1931 into a family of Neapolitan immigrants. The toughness of those two cities, forged by crime and a hard-living itinerant working class, would bleed into his work. His thrillers were often set in the seamier corners of the Côte d’Azur and peopled with men on the make and women making do.

A born rebel, in his youth Japrisot disregarded authority at every turn. He was expelled from his Jesuit school and moved to the Sorbonne to study philosophy, where he ignored his teachers, using lectures to write fiction. The result of those wayward years would be his shocking debut novel, The False Start (Les mal partis). Published when the writer was only seventeen, the book chronicled a love affair between a schoolboy and a nun. It was a tremendous hit both in France and abroad, selling some 800,000 copies in America in just three weeks.

Early notoriety brought him to that iconic figure of disaffected youth, Holden Caulfield. At twenty, Japrisot landed the job of translating The Catcher in the Rye into French. He took other translating commissions and worked for periods in advertising and publicity. When he returned to his own fiction, in the early 1960s, he employed the anagrammatical tag of Japrisot and with it embraced a strange hybrid of police procedural, psychological study and social commentary. It proved to be a gritty yet dream-like combination.

Japrisot wrote his first two crime novels in a month. The 10.30 from Marseille (Compartiment tueurs) took the locked-room mystery beloved of Christie and Conan Doyle and reconfigured it for the grimy confines of a French railway carriage, while Trap for Cinderella (Piège pour Cendrillon) was an ingenious and bitter fairy tale in which a fire at a Riviera villa leaves a young heiress unrecognisable from burns. Or is she the housekeeper’s daughter, a poor cuckoo in the gilded nest? No one knows, least of all the girl.

Both books appeared in 1962. Short, sharp and clever, they won him the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and comparisons with Georges Simenon. It was a fitting reference point: Japrisot’s bedroom was lined with the works of Maigret’s creator.

More enigmas were to follow. In 1966 he published The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun – possibly my favourite title of any novel – which details a road trip fuelled by torment. Its heroine, Dany, is a put-upon secretary who takes her boss’s white Thunderbird on a joy-ride from Paris to the south of France. En route things turn upside down: Dany is recognised by people she doesn’t know and is told she has visited places she has never been. It’s a riddle as captivating as it is terrifying. And, again, it illustrated the author’s fondness for a perplexed protagonist.

The promise – or threat – of sex is never far from the surface in a Japrisot story. His men are brutal, his women brutalised. In One Deadly Summer (L’été meutrier) a young man is driven witless by the erotic manipulations of a Provençal femme fatale in a scenario that presents sex as both crime and punishment. Japrisot almost always wrote from a female viewpoint.

He turned that novel into a screenplay (making a star out of Isabelle Adjani in the process). He saw the mechanics of cinema and literature as interchangeable: he made the page widescreen and his films as considered as his written works. He also brought other writers’ work to the screen, such as Pauline Réage’s notorious The Story of O, and briefly tried his hand at directing.

A list of the stars in his film projects – Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Michel Piccoli, Audrey Tautou – reads like a who’s who of French cinema. But when English-speaking actors were required it was the coarse talents of Oliver Reed and Charles Bronson that were called upon, rather than the matinee idols.

He cultivated a reputation as a tough guy himself. There were claims that he was impossible to work with. His French publisher at Denoël insisted on accompanying him to London for a book tour just to keep him in line. In the end he behaved like an angel. Here was a sheep in wolf’s clothing; a reversal that is reflected in his stories. While cloaked in intrigue and peppered with violence, their real subject is the indomitable human spirit. He was as much a romantic – albeit a fatalistic one – as he was a purveyor of hard-boiled crime.

The author never reaped the rewards created by the slow-burn success of A Very Long Engagement and its subsequent film adaptation. Japrisot faded out with the twentieth century, as the effects of drink and his favoured Gauloises took their toll. ‘Treat everything with derision,’ he said with rancour in one of his last interviews. ‘It’s the only way to counter misfortune.’ His final novel remained unfinished.

And yet, however unlikely it might seem, there remains something buoyant about Japrisot’s cracked mysteries. Love is resilient, the hurt heal, clarity is found. The broken mirrors are put back together again.

Christian House, 2019

The Lady

I have never seen the sea.

The black-and-white tiled floor sways like water a few inches from my eyes.

It hurts so much I could die.

I am not dead.

When they attacked me – I’m not crazy, someone or something attacked me – I thought, I’ve never seen the sea. For hours I had been afraid: afraid of being arrested, afraid of everything, I had made up a whole lot of stupid excuses and it was the the stupidest one that crossed my mind: Don’t hurt me, I’m not really bad, I wanted to see the sea.

I also know that I screamed, screamed with all my might, but that my screams remained trapped in my throat. Someone lifted me off the ground, someone smothered me.

Screaming, screaming, screaming, I thought again, It’s not real, it’s a nightmare, I’m going to wake up in my room, it will be morning.

And then this.

Louder than all my screams, I heard it: the cracking of the bones of my own hand, my hand being crushed.

Pain is not black, it is red. It is a well of blinding light that exists only in your mind. But you fall into it all the same.

Cool, the tiles against my forehead. I must have fainted again.

Don’t move. Above all, don’t move.

I am not lying flat on the floor. I am kneeling with the furnace of my left arm against my stomach, bent double with the pain which I would like to contain and which invades my shoulders, the nape of my neck, my back.

Right near my eye, through the curtain of my fallen hair, an ant moves across a white tile. Further off, a grey, vertical shape, which must be the pipe of the washbasin.

I don’t remember taking off my glasses. They must have fallen off when I was pulled backwards – I am not crazy, someone or something pulled me backwards and stifled my screams. I must find my glasses.

How long have I been like this, on my knees in this tiny room, plunged into semi-darkness? Several hours or a few seconds? I have never fainted in my life. It is less than a hole, it is only a scratch in my memory.

If I had been here for very long someone outside would have become worried. I was standing in front of the sink, washing my hands. My right hand, when I hold it against my cheek, is still damp.

I must find my glasses, I must get up.

When I raise my head quickly – too quickly – the tiles spin, I am afraid I will faint again, but everything subsides, the buzzing in my ears and even the pain. It all flows back into my left hand, which I do not look at but which feels like lead, swollen out of all proportion.

Hang on to the basin with my right hand, get up.

On my feet, my blurred image moving with me in the mirror opposite, I feel as if time is starting to flow again.

I know where I am: the toilets of a service station on the Avallon road. I know who I am: an idiot who is running away from the police, a face towards which I lean my face almost close enough to touch, a hand which hurts and which I bring up to eye level so I can see it, a tear which runs down my cheek and falls onto this hand, the sound of someone breathing in a strangely silent world: myself.

Near the mirror in which I see myself is a ledge where I left my handbag when I came in. It is still there.

I open it with my right hand and my teeth. I look for my second pair of glasses, the ones I wear for typing.

Clearly visible now, my face in the mirror is smudged with dust, tear-stained, tense with fear.

I no longer dare look at my left hand, I hold it against my body, pressed against my badly soiled white suit.

The door of the room is closed. But I left it open behind me when I came in.

I am not crazy. I stopped the car. I asked them to fill the tank. I wanted to run a comb through my hair and wash my hands. They pointed to a building with white walls behind the station. Inside it was too dark for me, so I did not shut the door. I don’t know now whether it happened right away, whether I had time to fix my hair. All I remember is that I turned on the tap, that the water was cool – oh, yes, I did do my hair, I’m sure of it! – and suddenly there was a kind of movement, a presence, as of something alive and brutal behind me. I was lifted off the floor, I screamed with all my might without making a sound, I did not have time to understand what was happening to me, the pain that pierced my hand shot through my whole body. I was on my knees, I was alone, I am here.

Open my bag again.

My money is there, in the envelope with the office letterhead. They didn’t take anything.

It’s absurd, it’s impossible.

I count the notes, lose track, start again. A cold shadow passes over my heart; they didn’t want to take my money or anything else, all they wanted – I am crazy, I will go crazy – was to hurt my hand.

I look at my left hand, my huge purple fingers, and suddenly I can’t stand it any more, I collapse against the basin, fall to my knees again and howl. I will howl like an animal until the end of time, I will howl, weep and stamp my feet until someone comes, until I see daylight again.

Outside I hear hurried footsteps, voices, gravel crunching.

I howl.

The door opens very suddenly onto a dazzling world.

The July sun has not moved over the hills. The men who come in and lean over me, all talking at once, are the ones I passed when I got out of the car. I recognise the owner of the garage and two customers who must be local people who had also stopped for petrol.

While they are helping me to my feet, through my sobs my mind fastens on a silly detail: the tap in the basin is still running. A moment ago I didn’t even hear it. I want to turn the tap off, I must turn it off.

The men don’t understand why I have to do that. Nor do they understand that I don’t know how long I have been here. Nor that I have two pairs of glasses. As they hand me the pair that fell off, I keep repeating that they are mine, they really are mine. They say, ‘Calm yourself, come now, calm yourself.’ They think I am crazy.

Outside, everything is so clear, so peaceful, so very real that my tears suddenly stop. It’s an ordinary petrol station like any other. With pumps, gravel, white walls, a gaudy poster pasted to a window, a hedge of spindle and oleander. Six o’clock on a summer evening. How could I have screamed and rolled on the floor?

The car is where I left it. Seeing it reawakens my old anxiety, the anxiety that had hold of me when it happened. They’re going to question me, ask me where I am from, what I have done, I will answer all wrong, they will guess my secret.

In the doorway of the office towards which they lead me a woman in a blue apron and a little girl of six or seven are watching me with curious, interested faces, as if at the theatre.

Yesterday afternoon, too, at the same time, a little girl with long hair and a doll in her arms watched me approach. And yesterday afternoon, too, I was ashamed. I can’t remember why.

Yes, I can. Quite clearly. I can’t stand children’s eyes. Behind me there is always the little girl I was, watching me.

The sea.

If things go badly, if I am arrested and must provide a – what is the word? – an alibi, an explanation, I will have to begin with the sea.

It won’t be altogether the truth, but I will talk for a long time without catching my breath, half crying, I will be the naïve victim of a cheap dream. I’ll make up whatever I need to make it more real: attacks of split personality, alcoholic grandparents, or that I fell down the stairs as a child. I want to nauseate the people who interrogate me, I want to drown them in a torrent of syrupy nonsense.

I’ll tell them I didn’t know what I was doing, it was me and it wasn’t me, understand? I thought it would be a good opportunity to see the sea. It’s the other one who’s guilty.

They will answer, of course, that if I was so anxious to see the sea, I could have done it a long time ago. All I had to do was buy a train ticket and book a room at Palavas-les-Flots, other girls have done it and not died of it, there is such a thing as paid holiday.

I’ll tell them that I often wanted to do it but that I couldn’t.

Which is true. Every summer for the past six years I’ve written to tourist offices and hotels, received brochures, stopped in front of shop windows to look at bathing suits. One time I came within an inch – in the end, my finger refused to press a buzzer – of joining a holiday club. Two weeks on a beach in the Balearics, round-trip fare and visit to Palma included, orchestra, swimming teacher and sailing boat reserved for the duration of the visit, good weather guaranteed by Union-Life, and I don’t know what else. Just reading the description gave you a tan. But, for some unknown reason, every summer I spend half my vacation at the Hotel Principal (there is only one) of Montbriand in the Haute Loire, and the other half near Compiègne at the home of a former classmate who has a husband, you know, and a deaf mother-in-law. We play bridge.

It’s not that I am such a creature of habit or that I have a passion for card games. And it’s not that I am particularly shy. As a matter of fact, it takes a lot of nerve to relate memories of the sea and St Tropez to your colleagues when you are fresh from the forest of Compiègne. So I can’t explain it.

I hate people who have seen the sea, I hate people who haven’t seen it, I think I hate the whole world. There you are. I think I hate myself. If that explains it, all well and good.

My name is Dany Longo. Marie Virginie Longo, to be exact. I made up Danielle when I was a child. I have lied all my life. Now I wouldn’t mind Virginie, but it would be hard to explain.

My legal age is twenty-six, my mental age eleven or twelve, I am five feet six inches tall, I have dirty blond hair which I dye once a month with hydrogen peroxide, I am not ugly but I wear glasses – with tinted lenses, darling, so that no one will realise I am short-sighted – but everyone does, stupid – and the thing I am best at is keeping my mouth shut.

I have never said anything to anyone but Please pass the salt. Except twice and both times I suffered. I hate people who don’t understand the first time you slap their hands. I hate myself.

I was born in a village in Flanders of which I remember only the smell of the coal mixed with mud which the women were allowed to gather near the mines. My father, an Italian refugee who worked at the railway station, died when I was two years old. He was run over by a train from which he had just stolen a box of safety pins. Since it’s from him that I inherited my short-sightedness, I assume that he had misread what was printed on it.

This happened during the Occupation, and the convoy was on its way to the German army. A few years later my father was rehabilitated in a way. As a memento of him I still have somewhere in my chest of drawers a silver or silver-plated medal embossed with the image of a slender girl breaking her chains like a carnival strongman. Every time I see a strongman performing on the pavement I think of my father, I can’t help it.

But there are other heroes in my family. At the Liberation, less than two years after the death of her husband, my mother jumped out of a window of our town hall just after her head had been shaved. I have nothing to remember her by. If I tell someone this one day I will add: not even a lock of her hair. If they give me a horrified look, I don’t care.

I had seen her only two or three times in two years, poor girl, in the visiting room of an orphanage. I couldn’t possibly tell you what she was like. Poor, and looking it, probably. She came from Italy too. Her name was Renata Castellani. Born in San Appollinare, province of Frosinone. She was twenty-four when she died. I have a mother younger than I am now.

I read all this on my birth certificate. The sisters who brought me up always refused to tell me about my mother. When I finished school and was set free, I returned to the village where we used to live. I was shown the part of the cemetery where she was buried. I wanted to save up and do something, buy her a tombstone, but there were other people with her, they wouldn’t let me.

Well, I don’t give a damn.

I worked for a few months in Le Mans as a secretary in a toy factory, then in Noyon for a solicitor. I was twenty when I found a job in Paris. I now earn 1,270 francs a month, after tax, for typing, filing, answering the telephone and occasionally emptying the waste-paper baskets in an advertising agency with a staff of twenty-eight.

On this salary I can have steak for lunch and yoghurt and jam for dinner, dress just about the way I like, rent a one-bed on Rue de Grenelle, and improve my mind twice a week with Marie-Claire, and every night with a widescreen TV set on which I only have three more payments to make. I sleep well, don’t drink, smoke in moderation, have had a few affairs, but not the kind that would shock the landlady, I don’t have a landlady but I do have the respect of the people down the hall, I am free, without responsibilities and utterly miserable.

Those who know me – the layout men at the agency or the woman who sells me groceries – would probably be amazed to hear me complain. But I must complain. I realised before I learned to walk that if I didn’t do it, no one would do it for me.

*

Yesterday afternoon, Friday, 10 July. It seems like a century ago, another life.

It couldn’t have been more than an hour before the agency closed. The agency occupies two floors of what was until recently a private house, all volutes and colonnades, near the Trocadéro. It is still full of crystal chandeliers that tinkle with every breath of air, marble fireplaces, and tarnished mirrors. My office is on the second floor.

There was sunlight beating on the window behind me and on the papers that covered my desk. I had checked the plan for the Frosey campaign (the eau de toilette that is fresh as dew), spent twenty minutes on the phone trying to get a weekly magazine to lower the price of a badly printed ad, and typed two letters. A little earlier I had gone out as usual for a cup of coffee at the nearby coffee bar with two copy girls and a pretty boy from ad space. He was the one who had asked me to call about the botched ad. When he handles it himself he lets them get away with murder.

It was an ordinary afternoon, and yet not completely so. At the studio the draughtsmen were talking about cars and Kiki Caron, lazy girls were coming into my office to pinch cigarettes, the assistant to the assistant to the boss, who works hard at trying to seem indispensable, was braying in the hall. There was nothing to distinguish that day from other days, but everyone exuded that impatience, that suppressed