The Empty Secret

Steven Shaviro’s recent entry on the film Time Out reminded me of The Adversary, the non-fiction book about the case from which Time Out takes some of its plot. As in the film, Jean-Claude Romand drove over the border to Switzerland every day. He pretended to have a job at the WHO in Geneva; he sometimes hung around WHO headquarters, pilfering stationery and brochures. More purely than in the film, though, he did nothing, day after day. He made absolutely no money; there were no smuggling schemes, as in the film; he borrowed money from his family and his in-laws. On the point of being discovered, he murdered his wife and children and burned their house down.

It’s the doing nothing that fascinates me.

Romand started doing nothing in med school. He failed the exam that would have let him advance into his third-year training; moreover, he did not tell anyone he had failed. He stayed registered at school. He studied. He would be allowed to take the exam again (in secret, though, from his friends and family.) At this point, his secret life was merely on loan from his public life; once he passed the exam, he would again be what he seemed.

On the day of the make-up exam, though, he never left his room. He slept through the time appointed for the exam. This is delightful to me: he’s not diabolical, he’s Oblomovian. He exploited a curious lapse in the school regulations: there was no positive provision for throwing out someone who failed this exam twice. Nor did this mean they expected people to do an American-style perpetual schooling. A good Frenchman would’ve thrown himself out, would’ve declared his failure to everyone and lived with the shame, or even killed himself. Romand just quietly kept registering, pretending to always be in different courses than his friends. When everyone else graduated, he stopped going to med school, too.

He kept it up for eighteen years, from the failed exam to the murder of his children. All this time, he had secrets but no interiority. That his secret life was so dull fascinates me. Sleeping in his room, sleeping in his car at a Swiss rest stop, waiting for the hours to pass until it was time to go home again.