With “The Third Life”, Mediapart journalist Fabrice Arfi retraces the journey of a Romanian spy in France during the Cold War. A very personal text in the form of a story of an impossible investigation, where well-kept political secrets emerge.
At first, it's almost a fairy tale. In the 1960s, in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, an old retired Italian immigrant, Jean Benedetto, was contacted by a Romanian national who said he was his nephew. He would be the son of a brother of Jean, a soldier during the 1914 war, whom everyone believed to have died on the front. He would actually have started a new life in Romania.
Jean invites his nephew to come live with his wife in Villeurbanne, helps him obtain papers. Moving? Except that everything is false: the man has no relation to Jean, he is a spy from the Romanian Securitate sent to France thanks to this subterfuge to carry out a secret mission. Fabrice Arfi investigated for fifteen years to try to discover what this mission consisted of.
Firstly, I was an investigative journalist, which I have been for 25 years, but secondly, I was a little something else. I abandoned this journalist to conquer territories of writing and storytelling that are unusual for me.
Scandals revealed under his pen
Seasoned journalist, Fabrice Arfi has worked at Mediapart since the founding of this online investigative media by Edwy Plenel. He heads the investigations department there. Bettencourt affairs, Karachi, Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential campaign, Jérôme Cahuzac's hidden account, a number of scandals which have shaken the French Republic in recent years have been revealed under his pen.
When in 2008 he first heard about this Romanian spy story, he dove into it with his usual weapons. Investigation, archives, contacts, verification. “But sometimes, the closer we get to the truth, the more it seems to slip away,” he explains in the QWERTZ podcast on November 18. Indeed, fifteen years later, several gray areas persist, which Arfi has still not succeeded in clarifying.
But that’s precisely what makes his book fascinating. More than a simple investigation, “The Third Life” is the story of an impossible investigation, a state fiction with drawers where well-kept political secrets emerge, where every certainty is called into question. In the background, the troubled atmosphere of the Cold War, forgotten ministers, an atmosphere worthy of a John Le Carré novel, and at the center an investigator destabilized by so many mysteries. In the end, this book is undoubtedly Fabrice Arfi's most personal text.
It took me a long time to realize that in trying to understand Benedetto's life, it was me that I was investigating, more precisely the relationship that a journalist has with the truth.
A personal story
Little by little, over the pages, Arfi reveals his obsession with this story which he discovers has as protagonists several characters he personally knew, including his father, an inspector in the financial brigade at the time of the events. Above all, we guess that this text confronts him with his own relationship to fiction and reality.
“There is something in the act of writing which consists of leaving the destiny of a book to those who read it, as much as to the one who writes it. This was not usual for the journalist investigator that I am. This is why this story first fascinated me by what it told, then haunted me by what it did not tell,” he confides.
Sylvie Tanette/mh
Fabrice Arfi, “The third life”, éditions du Seuil, October 2024.
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