As a child, the narrator chose to settle at the foot of his building to escape the violence of his father. Thus “The Figure” is born, an emanation of his consciousness, which helps him to survive. In this unusual tale, the French author and singer Bertrand Belin speaks of the incapacity to recount suffering.
“The neck of a goose was cut off. Why not start by reporting this event?” The image chosen by the narrator establishes the metaphor of the wound. Like the body of the bird that has just been decapitated, it continues to move after the death of the person who is its source. In the 170 or so pages that follow, this man attempts to begin the story of his childhood memories, from that day when he made the radical decision never to go up to the family apartment, where a simple friction of his fingers against each other is enough to trigger paternal ire and an avalanche of blows.
It wasn’t with the entire family that I wanted to cut ties. Only with the head of the family. It’s a rank. This is the rank of leader. That says a lot. I cut ties, I did very well.
A sweater, pears, a bay leaf
At the foot of the building, sheltered by a laurel tree, the little boy begins a life of observation and gives birth to the figure, his interior double, his “Sancho Panza”, both threat and safeguard. Sheltered in a small room, taking refuge on a shabby mattress, he observes. The comings and goings of his mother, whose physiognomy and nervous look betray the violence of the father. The neighbors too, a roofer and his wife. The corpse of a dog on the beach. A quick foray, the only one, into the family apartment to grab a sweater. The pear tree in a garden not far away, whose fruits will be the occasion for a theft and a pair of slaps.
In “The Figure”, it is less the story that counts than an arrangement of small memories in bulk, and the attempt of the narrator (Bertrand Belin himself barely disguised) to recount the suffering. Like a motor that struggles to start, like knitting whose stitches must be passed backwards and forwards, like a song whose chorus returns tirelessly, there is a play of repetitions of words, of motifs. “It seems essential to say what was, but it also seems impossible to say it as it was. The book is in this space between the two. Between the possible and the feasible,” comments Bertrand Belin.
Fantastic tale
On the edge of a fantastic tale, “The Figure” recalls Guy de Maupassant’s “Horla”, this entity symbolizing inner anxieties. And, not far away either, there is the universe of Italo Calvino’s short stories: his “Vicomte Pourfendu” (1951) only had the right half of his body left, while his “Baron Perché” (1957) chose to live his life in the trees without touching the ground.
-For Bertrand Belin, it’s about finding a way to “weave reality and integrate terror” from the impossible; characteristics which are also found in the tales and legends of Brittany that Bertrand Belin read so much as a child. “The figure” is like a little literary UFO; a proposed monologue which readily makes Bertrand Belin’s characteristic voice resonate in our heads. But who knows then if it is him or The figure who speaks?
Ellen Ichters/sc
Bertrand Belin, “The figure”, POL, January 2025.
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