Collected Prose

she even commissioned an artist to create a life-size statue of the priest—which now stands in her front yard as an enduring testament to her cause.
    Although not a father himself, C. became a kind of pseudo-father seven or eight years ago. After a falling out with his girlfriend (during which they temporarily broke up), his girlfriend had a brief affair with another man and became pregnant. The affair ended almost at once, but she decided to have the baby on her own. A little girl was born, and even though C. is not her real father, he has devoted himself to her since the day of her birth and adores her as if she were his own flesh and blood.
    One day about four years ago, C. happened to be visiting a friend. In the apartment there was a Minitel , a small computer given out for free by the French telephone company. Among other things, the Minitel   contains the address and phone number of every person in France. As C. sat there playing with his friend’s new machine, it suddenly occurred to him to look up his father’s address. He found it in Lyon. When he returned home later that day, he stuffed one of his books into an envelope and sent it off to the address in Lyon—initiating the first contact with his father in over forty years. None of it made any sense to him. Until he found himself doing these things, it had never even crossed his mind that he wanted to do them.
    That same night, he ran into another friend in a café—a woman psychoanalyst—and told her about these strange, unpremeditated acts. It was as if he had felt his father calling out to him, he said, as if some uncanny force had unleashed itself inside him. Considering that he had absolutely no memories of the man, he couldn’t even begin to guess when they had last seen each other.
    The woman thought for a moment and said, “How old is L.?,” referring to C.’s girlfriend’s daughter.
    “Three and a half,” C. answered.
    “I can’t be sure,” the woman said, “but I’d be willing to bet that you were three and a half the last time you saw your father. I say that because you love L. so much. Your identification with her is very strong, and you’re reliving your life through her.”
    Several days after that, there was a reply from Lyon—a warm and perfectly gracious letter from C.’s father. After thanking C. for the book, he went on to tell him how proud he was to learn that his son had grown up to become a writer. By pure coincidence, he added, the package had been mailed on his birthday, and he was moved by the symbolism of the gesture.
    None of this tallied with the stories C. had heard throughout his childhood. According to his mother, his father was a monster of selfishness who had walked out on her for a “slut” and had never wanted anything to do with his son. C. had believed these stories, and therefore he had shied away from any contact with his father. Now, on the strength of this letter, he no longer knew what to believe.
    He decided to write back. The tone of his response was guarded, but nevertheless it was a response. Within days he received another reply, and this second letter was just as warm and gracious as the first had been. C. and his father began a correspondence. It went on for a month or two, and eventually C. began to consider traveling down to Lyon to meet his father face to face.
    Before he could make any definite plans, he received a letter from his father’s wife informing him that his father was dead. He had been in ill health for the past several years, she wrote, but the recent exchange of letters with C. had given him great happiness, and his last days had been filled with optimism and joy.
    It was at this moment that I first heard about the incredible reversals that had taken place in C.’s life. Sitting on the train from Paris to Lyon (on his way to visit his “stepmother” for the first time), he wrote me a letter that sketched out the story of the past month. His handwriting reflected each jolt of the tracks, as if the speed of the train were an exact image of the thoughts racing through his head. As he put it somewhere in that letter: “I feel as if I’ve become a character in one of your novels.”
    His father’s wife could not have been friendlier to him during that visit. Among other things, C. learned that his father had suffered a heart attack on the morning of his last birthday (the same day that C. had looked up his address on the Minitel ) and that, yes, C. had been