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
I call her Lachesis. It’s a pretty name, I feel, for a spider. For a few days now, in an effort to break up my isolation and not limit my affective interactions to the three members of my family secluded with me, I’ve been working on taming her. Her silk thread is the last link connecting me to the world.
Lachesis is a longbodied cellar spider, Pholcus phalangioides if you please. She has eight long spindly legs and a bulbous straw-colored abdomen. I saw her for the first time on the bathroom wall. Approaching, I frightened her and she sped back to her web, woven into a corner of the ceiling. I understood then that it would take time to overcome her mistrust.
And time I have in spades. With the swat of a rag I killed seven flies, then climbed up on a stool to place them on her web. This was far too much game all at once for this frugal scrawny thing, and I feared for a moment that the weight of my offering would burst her web. How little I knew of the solidity of spider silk! Lachesis has since taught me that the Papuans of New Guinea even used it to make their fishing nets.
Little by little, I’ve managed to gain her trust. We talk to each other a lot. We talk for hours. It’s mostly me who does the talking, but I’ve learned to interpret her bending, her swaying, her little nods, and I believe I can say I no longer miss the meaning of her responses, which are always timely and wise. True, though, Lachesis is gifted above all with a remarkable knack for listening. I’ve spent the whole night sitting in the bathroom telling her about my life, confiding in her my torments, my anxieties, my regrets, my ambitions, and never does she show the slightest sign of impatience.
Sometimes Lachesis comes down from her web. I let her run around on my neck. She tickles me. Soon I can’t hold back my laughter. My god, in lamentable times like these, how precious that is, and how grateful I am to her for distracting me from my melancholy.
I slept an uneasy sleep and, this morning, we have a new friend. He’s not very cheerful, for one thing. But he seems to enjoy our company. He’s maybe a black beetle, or a palmetto bug, or a cockroach, though none of those names does him justice. He claims his name is Gregor. He has a lovely caramel color. I noticed Lachesis looking at him strangely. Could something be going on between them? Or am I mistaken, and Gregor is just my reflection in the mirror?
Until tomorrow.
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
(1 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: “Longbodied Cellar Spider” by Eric Heupel. Reproduced under CC BY-NC 2.0 license.