For three weeks beginning on March 19, the remarkably prolific and wildly imaginative French writer Éric Chevillard (M&L no. 8) kept a daily quarantine journal for Le Monde. (It has since moved to his blog, L’Autofictif, where he has mused that maybe he should change its name from “Sine die”—Latin for “indefinitely,” in the sense of postponement—to “Ad vitam æternam,” or “for eternity.”) Plenty of sheltered-in-place writers are doing similar work, of course, as he took care to remind us on day 15. But none have been so resolute, or so refreshing, in their refusal to take present conditions at face value. Instead, Chevillard is up to his old trick of finding a single loose thread in the fabric of daily life, winding it around a finger, and gently pulling until reality itself seems to unravel—a practice likely becoming, at the moment, more and more familiar to the rest of us.
—Daniel Levin Becker
In a storage closet I found a big bag of masks, a treasure of incalculable worth in these times when they are critical to our survival and yet so difficult to procure. There’s one small hitch, which is that they’re Zorro masks left over from a costume party I held in the garden some years ago. Now, we all know the mask of Zorro is a deceitful bedfellow, hiding only the top of your face, leaving your nose and mouth exposed. All it protects is your anonymity, in other words, and I’m not sure the killer virus targets its victims so precisely, nor that it chooses them based on looks. And so, since even the tightest-lipped mutes can still let out a nasty cough, the intrepid Don Diego de la Vega could have been fatally contaminated by his faithful servant Bernardo.
To make up for the government’s deficit, we’re now being asked to make our own masks. We’re supposed to cut them out of old clothes, sew on elastic bands, and then strap them around our ears, these pathetic scraps of our wedding dress or our genuine buckskin lederhosen (which were, granted, a bit tight in the waist).
As a responsible citizen, careful not to poison others by blowing my naturally opium- and anise-scented breath in their face, while also avoiding inhaling their fetid and noxious miasmas, I gave this little sewing project a try. And so compelling was the result that Suzie, seeing me thusly gussied, asked me immediately to make her an elephant trunk of her own.
I made other attempts. Each of my masked guises was met by my family with laughter or consternation. In spite of my longstanding and ardently professed opinions, they thought at first that I had joined the ignoble order of the Ku Klux Klan, wondering at the same time where the shower curtain had vanished to. Then they mistook me for the ghost of my grandfather. Then for the mummy of Ramses II. Then Achille Zavatta. Then Loie Fuller. Donald Duck. A windsock. An anteater. I kept at it, trying finer cloths, silkier fabrics. Then my partner asked me to stop ruining her panties.
Might I add that I almost died of asphyxiation when I covered the lower half of my face with a bathing cap that turned out to be perfectly watertight?
I was ready to give up when I had an idea, no doubt inspired by hearing so many television experts and ad hoc political commentators prattle on: what if ball gags were the best protection against the spread of the virus?
Until tomorrow.
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
(7 April 2020)
Éric Chevillard was born in 1964 in La Roche-sur-Yon in the west of France. He published his first novel, Mourir m’enrhume (Dying Gives Me a Cold), at the age of twenty-three, and has since gone on to publish more than twenty works of fiction, including The Crab Nebula, On the Ceiling, Palafox, Prehistoric Times, Demolishing Nisard, and The Author and Me. His novel The Brave Little Tailor is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Daniel Levin Becker is an editor, translator, and Oulipian based in Paris.
Banner: a still from The Mask of Zorro. Subject to copyright.