Philippe Lançon (Vanves, France; 1963) speaks of distant memories in the third person, as if they were from another. And in his case the slogan of Rimbaud takes brutal literalness, because it is.
It is another since the morning of January 7, 2015 , when chance wanted the writer, chronicler and literary critic to direct his bicycle first to the writing of Charlie Hebdo before that of Libération , his two places of work, to join the usual council meeting on Wednesdays of the satirical weekly. Everything was as usual, until the Kaláshnikov rifles of the Kuachi brothers sowed terror.
Coincidentally Lançon was about to change his life, he had accepted an invitation from Princeton University (USA) to teach, he already had the ticket to New York, where Gabriela, his Chilean girlfriend, was waiting for him. But what changed then at 51 was everything .
That is what Lançon narrates in El flap (Anagram in Spanish and Angle in Catalan), the survivor of the Charlie Hebdo massacre that turns the hell that happened then and that of the nine months into intimate literature, without fiction and relentless beauty of hospitalization, cures and reconstructive operations to repair what a bullet had taken: his lower jaw and his mouth . The work, very hard and at the same time subtle, without a hint of hatred or grandiloquence, was published in France by Gallimard as Le Lambeaux and became the book of 2018, with more than 300,000 copies sold, the Femina and Special Renaudot Awards and multiple translations.
Excerpts from the book 'The flap'
Drop down
'I was on the floor, face down, my eyes still open when I heard the noise of the bullets coming out of the innocent, childhood, drawing, and approaching the chest or the dream in which I was. There were no bursts. The one who moved towards the back of the room and fired a bullet at me and said: "Allahu Akbar!" [Allah is bigger]. He fired another bullet and repeated: "Allahu Akbar!" With these words, the impression of living an innocent woman returned one last time to overcome that of living something that had made me see and review Franck [Charb's bodyguard] unsheathe the weapon just seconds before, just seconds but and many more, because time was shattering at every step, at each bullet, at each "Allahu Ahbar!", and the next second drove away the previous one and sent it to a remote past and even beyond, to a world That had ceased to exist.
***
My body was in the narrow passage between the meeting table and the back wall; He had his head turned to the left. I opened one eye and saw two black legs appear on the other side, under the table, near the body of Bernard [Maris] and the end of a rifle that, rather than moving, floated. I closed my eyes and then opened them again like a child who believes that no one will see him if he dies; Because he made me dead. He was the child he had been, he was again, he played to make me the dead Indian while telling me that perhaps the owner of the black legs would not see me or believe me dead, while also telling me that he was going to see me and kill me. At the same time I expected the invisibility and the coup de grace, two forms of disappearance. Although he believed me safe from any scratch. However, I was wounded, motionless enough and with my head bathed in probably enough blood so that the murderer, when encircling, did not judge it necessary to finish me off.
***
It was as in Racine, when Athalia dreams that her mother bends over her to pity her: «His shadow to my bed seemed to descend; / and I held out my hands to hug her. / But I found only a horrible mixture / of broken bones and bruised flesh, dragged by the mud, / flaps full of blood, and disgusting limbs / that voracious dogs quarreled with each other. After leaving the hospital, people I didn't know, often merchants, wondered what had happened to me. "An accident," I replied. He was too lazy for them. Many, believing they knew the right answer, told me: "A dog has bitten you, hasn't it?" I answered yes. I always answered yes to the hypotheses that were thrown at me, that reassured those who made it, but that of the voracious dogs ended up liking me more than the others, especially because it was plausible. The correct hypothesis never appeared.
***
In those days I realized how a newspaper like 'Charlie' was part of the French social contract - or what was left, to be more exact. Most people would never have signed this contract if they had given it; but it was not essential to sign it to enjoy it, even without wanting to. It was enough to breathe the air in which his ink had dried for a long time. It was not the air of what they will say, not even that of sharpness or competition. It was the air of farce and disrespect, the air that put everyone in a state of carelessness and critical spirit.
***
One day, in September, I entered rush hour on line 13 [of the subway]. I planted my flap in the noses of the passengers, and immediately I learned to look elsewhere while they looked at me, to be present but absent at the same time. An Arab boy climbed in a station. It looked bad, the cap well cut in the head. He sat in one of the folding seats. There was only one free seat in the car, next to him, but nobody occupied it, neither I nor the others. And that I was tired. But something inside me didn't want to install my flap, my fragility, my last nine months by his side. The boy was throwing aggressive glances left and right, as if to verify the effect it produced: «I try to be exactly the one you believe, and I am even worse because that is what you want». His appearance, my fragility, the false indifference of the passengers, all this made me sadder than I could have imagined. He went down before me.
That other Philippe Lançon in a passage, full of tubes and cannulas and that can only communicate with a blackboard, is known incapable of issuing judgment, because «the nerve that joined me to the power to judge seemed cut off, like the one that joined me the memory". A literary and theatrical critic who can no longer judge or criticize seems a contradiction, but that is El flap , a brave and intimate suspension of the trial before horror . "It is not the surgeon nor the physiotherapist nor the psychologist nor the writing of this book that reconstructs that, but time," he says. "That is life, the ability to judge, mock, say nonsense."
Although Lançon clarifies that the work has nothing therapeutic , he acknowledges that the writing, or rather the trade, did help him, when he began writing his chronicles for Charlie Hebdo from the hospital bed. "I had more than 30 years of journalism in tow and that was like a second nature that I didn't lose," he explains. «Even with morphine, the journalist realized that he was in a privileged position to describe hospital life. The gesture of writing an article returned me to the ordinary of the trade in an extraordinary world, in which I am still installed », he confesses.
With that precedent he ventured with El flap, between June and December 2017. «I say it is the story of my birth, what happens is that in my cradle there were always texts, music and images», he says about cultural references, from Pascal or Proust to Bill Evans or Chet Baker. "There is no critic line, there is such a Kafka page or such a moment of the Goldberg Variations of Bach as an act of life," he clarifies. The "war wounded" life , as many would define it, starting with the fireman who helped the toilets rescue him among the bodies. Expression that still generates a short circuit in French society. «The word designated the violence of the act, gave an entity its name, because there was a war there in the peaceful center of Paris, between the streets of the Bastille and the Republique, the two symbols of the Revolution and the Republic» , he explains, and goes further, sticking his finger in a large and absurd sore like the one he had on his face. "Although many do not like it, those two poor murderers were children of the French Republic , they were the people."
Understanding that was the challenge Lançon posed with the "novel," because he does not hesitate to call his testimony a fiction novel, "and that the reader understand my state of soul," he says.
And what about hate or resentment? "Never. What I did feel was angered by a part of the French left that tried to explain with Marx's theory of reflection to these young Islamists as children of battered Arabs under state racism. It may be true, but at that time he only demonstrated the lack of tact and the dirty pride of these left-wing intellectuals, ”he whips. "These kinds of events should teach us all a little modesty."
Lançon no longer breaks into tears every time he names his murdered companions, masters of the cartoons like Charb, Cabu or Tignous, but the wounds are far from healing, as the complete reconstruction of his face is still far away. "I felt closer to Wolinski, but sharing the last two minutes of them all makes them my intimate companions forever, " says the "last witness." "I saw Bernard Maris a hundred times, but none of them has the strength of the last image," he confesses, recalling his brains scattered inches from his own pool of blood. And the "great paradox" of incomprehensible terror is that instead of silencing the satirical weekly, it saved it from financial ruin. "Without the attack, I don't know if Charlie would live today," he acknowledges. "Killing half of us gave us momentary fame and a status of symbols that allowed us to survive," he adds, filming "the black humor of life: one more proof of Charlie's reason for being." And be careful because that same acid humor applies to Lançon himself, remembering how he was looking for his social security card when he was transferred to the operating room, with his face shattered and on the verge of death. "The good bourgeois citizen survives everything," he laughs.
The eloquent title refers to the surgical technique of reconstructing one part with another of the body: Lançon carries part of his fibula in the jaw. But also in the plural is a colloquial expression of being "torn to pieces" ( je suis en lambeaux ). "I wanted to relegate this shadow of pathos to a second place, and tell only the history of reconstruction without giving political or philosophical lessons," he clarifies, "because we are all victims, even my surgeon." But "the technique of reconstruction in the political and social does not work at all," he warns. "I don't know if something similar is going to happen, but I don't see any reason why it won't happen again ."
"We know it in Charlie , because we receive daily threats from those who want to finish the job," he reveals. Not in vain the headquarters of the weekly today is confidential, and even has in its facilities "a bunker to survive several days." «With the appearance of the terrible concept of respect, not even today the left understands satirical humor and does not know how to react, because whoever censures it now is not the powers of the State, but the violence that comes from below, of the children of the people », Concludes with the hope of knowing who washed those young people's heads in the trial to be held in 2020.
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