“I spent my whole life trying to hide the truth – without knowing what truth it was about”, confides Monica Sabolo somewhere in The clandestine lifehis seventh novel.
This truth, buried in the heart of Lake Geneva in a chest to which she threw away the key, persists like a bouquet of barely visible bubbles between two waves. This repressed memory resurfaces in a story where the intimacy of the writer, who was born in Milan in 1971 and grew up in Geneva, is intertwined with the upheavals of the violent political history of the end of the last century.
Created in 1979 in the wake of the “years of lead”, Direct Action (AD) is a French far-left terrorist group that caused a stir at the time. In the vein of movements such as the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, Direct Action will claim more than 80 attacks, robberies, machine-gunnings or assassinations on French territory between 1979 and 1987.
Members of AD liked to quote Bertolt Brecht’s sentence: “Which is more moral: to create a bank or to attack it? Their radicalization will culminate in November 1986 with the assassination of Georges Besse, CEO of Renault. Three months later, four people will be arrested, including Nathalie Ménigon and Joëlle Aubron, the two young women who were held directly responsible for this murder.
By discovering this news item 30 years later, Monica Sabolo thought she had the subject that would allow her to write “something easy and effective, which would have the chance of being sold and [lui] would survive”. The process has become frequent and could, it is true, turn easily here. It is not so. And the multiple parallels that the writer draws between her own existence and the terrorist movements of the 1970s and 1980s make us experience both depth and emotion.
She was still unaware that the Direct Action years were made of what constitutes it, “secrecy, silence and the echo of violence”.
From an unknown father
At the time when the writer was born, in the early 1970s, there was an attack every two days in Italy. The far right places bombs in garbage cans, blows up cars, trains, stations, while the far left blocks factories and sequesters bosses. At 15, she comes across a birth certificate which indicates that she was born in Milan to an unknown father.
Her father, however, she knew him. And as far as she can remember, he is a Parisian who worked for a United Nations agency in Geneva – before getting confused in smoky business which will also be discussed. “This is how my clandestine life, my legend, begins,” she writes, before quoting these verses from Aragon: “All memory is troubled water. / What do you want us to see there. / So slowly that one drowns in it…”
Through painstaking research, patiently approaching an old bookseller who “hid and transported men, weapons, money, bombs”, managing to meet Nathalie Ménigon, Monica Sabolo gradually approaching her subject without knowing — or without wanting to recognize — that it was her own secret that she was brushing against.
As when a documentary on the former members of Direct Action reminds him of his father’s habit of placing himself above the law, “that of men and that of God”, he who entered his room in child in the morning.
And when he stopped coming, she says, “someone disconnected the wires of my memory.” Oblivion thus represented the possibility of an escape, a clandestine life “born from a short circuit”.