From a fictional dialogue with his father in his novel Change, which will be published this month by Harvill Secker. Translated from the French by John Lambert.

Before meeting Elena I knew that there were lives other than ours of course, rich and poor, privileged and marginalized, people in the village like the pharmacist and the mayor who had advantages that you didn’t have, who had money and nice houses and whom we envied, but you have to enter those worlds to feel how real, how omnipresent the difference is, not only in terms of money but in the ways of thinking, walking, breathing, everything. I’d have liked to tell someone about this gulf and my fascination with it, the fact that I understood our world through Elena’s and Elena’s through ours (but perhaps when I say “I’d have liked to tell you this” it’s only because it’s too late now and because, protected by the sheer chronological impossibility, I can credit myself with the most beautiful, poetic intentions; perhaps deep down I was happy to keep these discoveries to myself, and happy with this new silence between us).

At home I’d become a stranger. I could no longer stand the stock phrases “they should bring back the death penalty” or “the right, the left, same difference,” and it got on my nerves to hear you repeat them. I was upset that I didn’t have parents like Elena’s who questioned all of the assumptions underlying what they said, and I’m ashamed of having thought it because I know it’s wrong, but deep down I resented you for being neither intelligent nor complex like Elena’s parents. I’d tell Mum how she should be bringing up my little brother and sister, He shouldn’t watch so much television, why don’t you get them to listen to classical music, and she’d get angry. I used new words, words that were unimportant but seemed distinguished: tedious, extraordinary, bucolic. I no longer said it’s late afternoon but it’s teatime, words from another world, and Mum laughed at me, “If it isn’t Monsieur Chic.”

I wrote messages to Elena saying that I hated my mother, that I hated you both. You couldn’t understand what I was becoming, I complained, you couldn’t understand because no one in this family had studied or experienced what I was going through, but it wasn’t true, all my lamenting was two-faced, deep down I was flattered by this incomprehension and distance.

One evening after dinner I said to Mum, I’m going to enjoy a cup of tea would you like some?—I didn’t say drink tea but enjoy tea, the way Elena did. I did it to show the new person I thought I was. Mum looked at me and laughed, Oh, now he’s playing Monsieur La-di-da, he’s a nobleman now, now he enjoys tea. She pretended to laugh but I could hear how hurt she was and see it in her face.

As for you, you didn’t say a thing. As always you were watching television in silence, and I have no idea what you thought of my transformation.

But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. I’m writing to tell you about the first time I felt my existence writhing inside me. It was one evening at Elena’s mother Nadya’s house and the mood was the same as always, ritualized, like in a dream you dream over and over again: the candles, the classical music far off in the kitchen, the bottles of wine around us, the silences between our comments—not like the silences I’d known when you’d gone to the café, Mum had finished cleaning up and fallen asleep on the sofa exhausted, with the TV on and no sound, no it wasn’t a silence like that, but a comfortable, privileged silence—even in silence there’s no equality.

Then Nadya asked me: And what do your parents do? If it’s not too nosy, I mean. I haven’t allowed myself to ask Elena.

I felt blocked, paralyzed. Something in me didn’t want to tell her that you’d worked at the factory your whole life until the accident that broke your back and stopped you from returning, when you retrained as a street sweeper, or that my mother cleaned the bodies of the old and dying in the village, suddenly I couldn’t say any of that. The shame was too great. I felt guilty about my story, how could I tell it, there, surrounded by these candles and this silence?

I turned things over in my head. I was sure that contrary to what she’d said, Elena had already told her. I couldn’t lie (later in Paris I would, when men I met in bars would ask me what my parents did for a living, I’d tell them you’re a lawyer or a university professor, the shame would make me lie).

So I chose the opposite strategy. Rather than lie or avoid the question, I said I came from a family of alcoholics and prisoners. Nadya raised her eyebrows. I don’t know if her surprise was genuine or feigned. I went on, I bet by now they’re watching some idiotic reality show, laughing their guts out and eating their third packet of crisps. I bet by now my dad’s on to his eighth pastis and has his hands on his fat stomach.

I was ashamed by what I said, but I said it. You hated crisps, you never ate them, you drank pastis, sure, and lots of it, but I’d never put up with people calling you an alcoholic, it was a judgmental word, even when Mum used it to talk about you I got angry, yet here I was using it too, I was exaggerating, not really lying but presenting reality in a way that would disgust her, I knew it, it was as if when push came to shove there was no difference between silence and exaggeration, as if not answering and exaggerating were the same thing, the same act, because in Nadya’s presence both of them let me put my past behind me.

I wanted to show Nadya that now I was on her side and against this past, and to do so I had to denigrate this past as much as possible. She smiled again and said: Oh I’m sure you’re exaggerating, I’m certain your parents are talking or wondering what you’re doing tonight.

I added: Oh they couldn’t care less about me. And no, they’re not talking. They never talk. What would they say to each other? They’re watching TV like always.

Nadya drew a long, resounding breath and we talked about something else. That was the first time I did that. Deep down I hated myself. I thought of you, of how much it would have hurt you to hear what I was saying, your disbelief perhaps, your question: Why are you saying this about us? I wanted so badly to be accepted by Nadya. I wanted so much to belong to her world. To belong to her world was to save myself from my childhood—is it possible to forgive me? I was suffering but later, when I went to sleep in the guest room next to Elena’s room, I lay down and closed my eyes, appeased, feeling that I belonged a little less to my past.

Yet despite everything my transformation was slower than I’d hoped or imagined it would be. That became clear one night when I was in Elena’s room—a memory that overshadows all the rest. Her parents and sister had gone to bed and like almost every night I’d left the guest room on tiptoe to go and sleep with her. For all those years her room was part of the architecture and geography of my being: a small attic with a garret window, poorly lit, hot in the summer. Elena was smoking in front of the open window. That night she turned to me: You know, I think it’s time you learned how to eat, it’d be better for you. The moment she said those words I felt my body stiffen. I’d never thought about it explicitly, never spelled it out to myself, but I knew exactly what she meant. I mean it’s for you, she went on, in front of other people you’ll do better in life if you don’t eat like a peasant. Or else you’ll leave a bad impression. I was silent. Wait here, don’t move. She left the room; I heard her going down the two flights to the ground floor. She came back up with a plate, a knife and fork, and half a baguette. I watched her like a vision of my future. I tried not to miss a thing, her breath, her flowing gestures.

She cut small pieces of bread no more than an inch or so in length and placed them on the plate. Then she looked at the pieces of bread, then at me, without saying a word, to see if I’d understood. I nodded slightly to indicate that she should go on. She whispered: Here, like this; she placed her hands on the knife and fork and showed me how to hold them, where to place the fingers on the handle, then she pricked the pieces of bread with the fork and brought them delicately to her mouth. That’s how you hold them, not like this, she said, grasping the knife and fork in her closed fists in a crude imitation of me holding my cutlery. I looked at her fingers, trying to remember everything so no detail would slip from my memory. She did it again, I watched her, then she gave me the knife and fork and I tried to reproduce the same gestures. No, she whispered, not like that, put your hand like this. I listened to her, Yes, that’s right, she continued, like that, that’s good. I had the feeling that I was accelerating time, that I was learning in a few minutes what her body had assimilated in fifteen years through contact with her family and the repetition of meals over days and seasons. When there was no more bread left she showed me how to place the knife and fork in the center of the plate, with the blade slipped between the tines of the fork, balanced, the way her mother did. At every meal over the next few days I tried to eat as Elena had shown me. The others were eating and they thought that’s what I was doing too, but in fact I was working, learning a new body.

I imitated Elena, her way of living and studying. Seeing as I slept in her house, I had a room and a desk to work at. I’d lock myself in, write and rewrite my homework in the house that Nadya kept absolutely silent during study time, two or three hours a day.

For the first time, I internalized the rhythm of this silence, its necessity, in my body, every day. It became a part of my biorhythm, something I’d never experienced because such a silence had never existed at home.

Later, when I fell out with Elena and her family, Nadya said to me: You took advantage of everything we gave you. What does that mean, to take advantage of something? Didn’t Elena also take advantage of what her mother gave to her? Her social background?

Are there people for whom taking advantage of what’s given to them is legitimate, and others for whom it’s a scandal, an expropriation?

Listen.

It’s night in Elena’s room. I’m lying next to her. We sleep there together in her tiny bed almost every night, my body against hers. She’s smoking. She’s opened the window so her parents don’t smell the smoke, and the cold of the night comes in and settles on our faces and arms.

It’s two or three in the morning, her parents are asleep, we had dinner together and drank a lot of wine. I turn my head toward her, see the cigarette between her fingers, the smoke leaving her mouth and wafting up and out the window.

She asks me if I want a drag. I say yes with a self-assured voice, as if I’ve done it before. The cigarette passes from her lips to mine and I inhale the smoke. My body tries to cough as the smoke enters my lungs but I repress it. I pass the cigarette back to Elena. She takes it without glancing at me, her eyes raised to the ceiling.

She says: Will we always stay together? I listen. I mean, you and I will never leave each other, right, we’re bound by a pact. I think when she says this I already know it’s a teenage thing to say, and so does she, we both know that it’s the kind of grand declaration you make when you’re a certain age, in the night after drinking too much, but I don’t mind, on the contrary.

I answer: Of course. We’ll never leave each other. I’m slightly ashamed because I can’t make sentences as beautiful and as poetic as Elena does. My shame disperses in the smoke around us, it mingles with the night, mellowed by the wine in my veins. She continues: We’ll live together and no one will understand our relationship because it won’t be like theirs.

She sketches our life: I’ll be a journalist and you’ll be a history teacher. We’ll live in a big ramshackle house with thousands of books stacked on top of one another. In the evening we’ll listen to classical music and open a bottle of wine, and we’ll lie down and listen to the music together. Sometimes we’ll dance. No one will understand.

Just as she finishes a new song comes from the speakers on the shelves between the books. I say, Want to dance? We’ve never done it before, she’s uncomfortable with her body, she never dances, but I ask her to and she says yes, I get up and take her hand and dance with her, in the middle of her cluttered room under the roof, and we dance for a long, long time, just us and the music around us, in the night, as if nothing existed at that moment but our two bodies against each other, no history, no past, no fear, no memories, no tomorrow.

I’m telling you this because when I reread what I’ve written so far, I see that I’m inevitably selecting certain moments in my story and forgetting others. There are things I don’t know or don’t want to tell, and I don’t want you to think that for me Elena was nothing but a tool for relearning myself, I don’t want you to imagine that I used her to get where I wanted to go. If that’s the takeaway from what I’ve written I’ve failed completely. I loved Elena, I loved her more than anything (even writing these words I feel stupid). It wasn’t a romantic relationship, there was no desire between us—I desired men, that was clear, even if I hid it—but what we had was more than friendship. I loved her.