As I said, my father was not in the habit of giving much away about himself. He was a compulsive liar, which means that his lies were not always necessary. He was always exaggerating, and depending on the effect he was trying to make, he would grotesquely inflate or deflate any sums of money central to the story he happened to be telling. He was, moreover, the kind of liar who, in order to conceal one lie, tends to make up a bigger one. If he had to justify being late, rather than saying that he’d met a friend or gone into a bar for a drink, he would come up with some bizarre tale about his taxi being involved in an accident or how he’d been the victim of arbitrary arrest. Almost as commonplace as his lies, then, were the confusions he created — someone spotting him in a particular place at a time when, according to my father, he had been somewhere else entirely; an acquaintance he supposedly met frequently but who, when he happened to bump into my mother, would ask after my father with the keen interest of someone who hadn’t heard from him in months; whole skeins of lies intended to hide other lies that had failed or been unmasked; excuses made up on the spur of the moment to cover his back whenever he was caught contradicting himself. My father lied continuously whether he needed to or not, and, naturally, like any habitual liar, he could never admit defeat, even when all the evidence was stacked against him. Once he began, he could not even contemplate retreat or defeat. He had an amazing ability to improvise. The worst thing is that he lacked all caution and always went full steam ahead. If something didn’t ring quite true in whatever he was saying, or if someone figured him out, he didn’t try to come up with a solution that would allow him to emerge unscathed, instead, without exception, he would merely dig himself still deeper in. This meant that when he did fail, he failed spectacularly, and at that point, his only alternative was to disappear. This isn’t something I observed during those few months, I couldn’t possibly generalize from that basis; it was something he did systematically, with anyone, in any situation, whenever he found his options reduced to zero and he either had to back up his words with deeds or admit that he had lied. There wasn’t even any need to catch him out, because such failures were usually the consequence of something as unnecessary as, for example, promising more than he could give or pretending he had certain contacts or a position in life that did not correspond to reality.
I only began to see this facet of his personality in its full glory once all contact with him had ceased and seemed unlikely to be resumed. My apprenticeship happened quite spontaneously, with no need for my mother to enlighten me. Women to whom he had promised a trip somewhere; “colleagues” he had known for a few short hours but with whom he had built up the nocturnal mirage of some business deal; recent acquaintances to whom he had promised a favor. The range was as varied as the needs of those who met him and whom he, for whatever reason, wanted to please. The only thing that almost never varied was the end result — after waiting vainly for him to call them or waiting, equally vainly, with their bags packed or having initiated proceedings on some plan for which he had promised his support, those affected, filled with the disquieting suspicion gradually forming in their minds that they had been deceived, would end up phoning our number. In those cases, my job and that of my mother consisted of encouraging them not to wait. As I say, no one taught me this. My mother didn’t tell me what I should do or how. After the first few calls from these worried or indignant people, from people who did not understand or who did not want to stop believing in him, an ability to explain without explaining came of its own accord. It was something that my mother and I did automatically and often without telling each other about the calls. Excusing him as far as possible, trying to defend him while ensuring as best we could that the person at the other end of the line would not continue to harbor any illusions. It wasn’t a matter of telling them about his life, but of making sure that they did not continue to wait, that they wipe him completely from their minds.
Maître d’s, real estate agents, town councilmen, private individuals selling or buying a car, architects, cleaning ladies, writers in search of a publisher or someone to read their manuscript, motel owners, haulage contractors, dry cleaners, gallery owners, stock breeders, commercial travelers, decorators, journalists, foremen, PR representatives, tailors, priests, would-be translators, antiquarians. . Weary voices, hurried voices, prudent voices, neutral voices, voices accustomed to giving orders and voices accustomed to obeying, awkward voices, strange voices, mercenary voices, unforgiving voices and pleading voices, blunt voices, insinuating voices, voices that faded at the first sign of trouble, preferring not to be heard; cheerful voices, sad voices, timid voices, unpleasant, overconfident voices, lying voices, voices that faltered or threatened revenge, arrogant voices, humble voices, voices that had nothing to lose or had already lost everything. There’s no point listing them all, there’s no point trying to reproduce the script of every conversation. My mother and I would answer the phone, listen for a few seconds, then immediately begin the slow process of demolition, spiraling around the main point, which we rarely reached but which, by dint of turning and turning, was finally revealed. “Don’t worry”; “He’s probably forgotten or couldn’t make it”; “I’m sure he must have had a good reason for not showing up”; “He was unexpectedly called away”; “No, we don’t know, either”; “It often happens”; “It’s not the first time he’s done this”; “The best advice I can give you is to forget all about him”; “Don’t wait for him”; “I promise I’ll tell him if I see him.” Every call was both different and the same, and the difficulty of dealing with it depended on the extent of the deceit and on the reluctance of the people on the other end to understand.
For years, thanks to the phone, which was in my father’s name, we were kept informed of his movements, even when we hadn’t seen him for quite a while. I wonder why my mother waited so long before changing the name or number on the account, why it wasn’t until we changed apartments that she finally took that step, and the only answer that occurs to me is that she didn’t want to cut all ties, that despite their separation, she wanted to know where he was and what he was doing. For quite some time after he left, those strange voices — never repeated, because they rarely called again — were the only means we had of keeping tabs on him.