«Sto cover the birds was to reveal the dismay. It was such an intense sensation that even now it is difficult for me to express that disturbance through language.” This is how Amélie Nothomb talks about her avian passion, the Belgian baroness translated into 30 languages which with Psychopomp brings book no. 32 as a gift: he starts by lighting incense for a whooping crane, swallows, blackbirds, sparrows, crows, even vultures and crows and then she inexorably drags you into her most intimate novel in which she evokes the aggression she suffered as a childthe terrible years of anorexia, the death of his father and the dialogue he has every day with the afterlife.
At 57, the time has come to deal with memories and pain, and pours them all into these pages. But why did you wait so long to introduce us to the eared swallow? It is my favorite bird because it looks like a dragon, with those majestic and absurd gray feathers, and it is one of the few to nest on the ground. At 11 I would wake up at dawn only to hear the birds singing in the silence of the early morning. I saw them whizzing through the sky and I was happy.
What is a “psychopomp”?
Greek mythology speaks of Hermes, the first psychopomp in history, but there are also Charon or Apollo: they accompanied souls into the kingdom of the dead. And they were able to listen to the words of the deceased as I continue to hear my father’s voice. He passed away during Covid, but his death was a masterpiece: he died at his house in my mother’s arms. We couldn’t attend his funeral, only months later I managed to enter the cemetery and had to lie down on his grave. I couldn’t resist. Then, while writing, I faced the loss of him and discovered that I too am a psychopomp.
Meaning what?
Every day I hear my father’s voice, we communicate perfectly. I discovered that there are many of us who succeed, many have written to me saying that they talk to their dead loved ones. Now don’t think we all have to hospitalize ourselves, though. We know we’re not crazy. She doesn’t have a PC or a cell phone, she doesn’t use emails. Why? I don’t think the Internet is a good means of communication. Every day in Paris a package of letters arrives for me at my publishing house. I answer 9 letters out of 10 by hand on a white sheet of paper. I write my books in a school notebook with a fountain pen and my hands are always dirty with ink and my right arm and shoulder are ruined.
Halfway through the book she recalls the rape she suffered at the age of 12 on the beach in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Just using a metaphorical image.
Yes, “the hands of the sea grabbed me”. There were four of them, young and fast. I was in the water, further away there were my father, my mother and my sister and they saw everything. My mother ran towards me, at which point they ran away. And she picked me up, she hugged me and said “Poor little girl”. Then silence. But I have to thank her for those two words because if she hadn’t said anything I would have gone crazy thinking, perhaps, that I had made it all up.
Then they took her to the doctor?
No, we went home and never talked about it. It was taboo. In Bangladesh, death was the order of the day, life was worth nothing. I always thought about it, but it was impossible for me to talk about it with anyone. I only found the courage at 40, after that horror remained inside a sarcophagus of silence all my life.
Psychopomp by Amélie Nothomb, Voland(120 pages, 16 euros)
For ten years she battled with anorexia, too.
I constantly thought about what had happened to me at sea and anorexia saved me from this obsession. Even though she tried to kill me. Until the body separated from the soul and at 16 I tried eating again: walnut cheese.
What do you remember of those years?
At the time, anorexia was a very rare and mysterious disease, especially in Southeast Asia. There were cases in Europe but in Burma, Bangladesh and Laos, where we lived when my father was a diplomat, people were dying of hunger for many reasons and no one cared much about it. I had reached the point of weighing 32 kilos, but in Dacca the girls were all skinny, they weighed the same as me. So I didn’t eat for four years, then from 16 to 22 I tried to get out of it. My parents tried to make me eat, but anorexics develop endless techniques to avoid swallowing food. I remember the permanent cold of that time, the same that I find today when I write.
He still wakes up at 4 in the morning to… fly?
Of course, I’ve been doing it for 35 years now. I feel an irresistible vertigo every day: I write and I start to fly. At least until 8.
Your boyfriend doesn’t complain about the alarm clock?
He’s a heavy sleeper, otherwise he would have already left me.
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