Firsts: A History of French Superheroes (French Literature) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Xabi Molia was born in Bayonne, France, in 1977. After studying literature, he wrote a dissertation on Hollywood disaster films for his doctorate in film studies. Molia taught at the Université de Poitiers until 2011, when he left to pursue his career as a novelist and filmmaker full-time. He has directed three feature films and has published numerous books, including six novels.  His latest novel, Des Jours sauvages [Wild Days], which tells the story of a group of French stranded on an island after an epidemic ravages the mainland, was published in France in Fall 2020.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I

His mind was a blank the first time he took flight.

At first, as he would tell the story, despite the muddy snow, which was still icy in spots on the sidewalks, he was hurrying down the street. A young woman would be expecting him soon in front of the Gare du Nord train station. He smiled. He was anxious and happy.

Up near Rue Greneta, a crush of people had formed alongside a patch of ice, and he was forced to slow down. Glancing at his watch, he realized he was going to be late when the idea that he’d go faster if he were flying came to mind. This was accompanied by a strong tingling in the soles of his feet, immediately replaced by a warm feeling on his cheeks. And then he felt like he should, why not, try to lift off from the ground. The next moment. . .

“Wait,” people would interrupt sometimes, “where did this urge to try come from?”

Jean-Baptiste would shrug his shoulders. In any case, no one, not an angel, not some voice inside his head had suggested it. He’d felt the desire, no, the need to. That’s all.

The next moment his right foot was standing some twenty centimeters in the air in front of him. Then his left foot followed. He was levitating. A wondrous feeling of euphoria made his heart race.

This was untrue. As he was to admit later to Thérèse Lambert, he had absolutely no clue how he got up there. He had, for a couple dozen seconds, lost consciousness of himself. But, assuming people expected a clear and detailed accounting from him, and also fearing that people had their suspicions— of what lie, he didn’t know— he concluded it would be more prudent to provide a lucid recollection of his train of thought and the feelings surrounding it before and then during the first manifestation of his capabilities.

To reporters, he recounted that fear had seized him when he found himself, soon after taking off, twenty or so meters farther down the street above the intersection of Boulevard de Sébastopol and Rue de Réumur. It was 4:17pm on January 19, and light snowflakes were floating above the streets of Paris. A young woman in a pale raincoat, having followed him with her eyes, had just fainted. A bus had slammed on its brakes right in the middle of the intersection. Behind it, in a long line of backed-up cars, drivers were starting to get angry, completely unaware of the marvel taking place before them. But crowds were already gathering on the sidewalks. Telephones were pointed at him.

It wasn’t terror that gripped him, Jean-Baptiste Fontane would add, but rather a kind of surprise, tinged with apprehension, as he saw himself floating, almost motionless, his feet slowly dangling in the air seven or eight meters above the crowd, the kind of surprise you feel when you realize you’ve surmounted some obstacle you thought impossible to overcome, or when you’ve made a witty remark without forethought: then, he would note, it’s like the feat compelled you to do it again, to never again step down from the pedestal onto which you’ve just hoisted yourself.

“You mean you were already afraid of what would happen to you?” he was reportedly asked several months later during his umpteenth interview.

“Yes, no question,” he supposedly answered.

With his amenable personality, Jean-Baptiste Fontane had taken on the habit of fulfilling the role others had envisaged for him— that this mantle might be ill-deserved had not bothered him for a long while. He was a slim thirty-five year-old man, neither handsome nor ugly, with a gentle look and an overly long nose. He worked behind the counter at the French National Library where he recorded the bar codes of volumes that had been borrowed and then returned, provided information to patrons, and, more rarely, got up to quash unduly boisterous conversations. Occasionally he regretted his inability to set himself apart with quick wit or charming jocularity. Clever remarks came to mind, but he never found the right moment to slip them into conversation.

When he was younger, the rare times he had done something outrageous so that people might take an interest in him, for example donning a wine-red fedora, or disclosing to a colleague that he had, one fine day, eaten a fish right from his aquarium raw, or even inviting a teaching assistant for a drink right out of the blue, he was only met with furrowed brows and misunderstandings.

From these embarrassing moments he concluded that his repertoire was wrong. He’d never be the type of person whose opinion was sought, whose absence was regretted. He thus resigned himself to play the role of a character that didn’t shine, a secondary character. And he must have noticed, as the years progressed, that this role did not displease him. It even had its advantages. Since no one ever came to see him he didn’t need to clean his apartment. His clothes became outdated without his needing to worry, and he could pay no heed to conversations, which he now sprinkled with pat responses and vague smiles. Perhaps some kind of laziness or true lack of character justified this attitude. Instead, I believe that it evinced some quiet fatalism, the kind of abnegation through which one’s life becomes simpler.

Moreover, in the hours and days that followed his first flight, he did nothing to refute the portrait being disseminated in the press and on social media. His story seemed both amazing and simple: here was Joe Average who’d transformed into a superhero. He was not offended to read or hear the accounts of coworkers, neighbors, and friends who rattled off the typical (but hurtful): “He’s a very normal guy.” “He’s really very ordinary.” “I never would’ve thought him capable of that.” He would just smile politely every time a reporter would ask him if his life before 1/19 hadn’t been a bit dull. Except for an award in a scale-model building contest, which had earned him a mention in the local paper (the young man had built a 1/87 model of the Bayeux cathedral and was now planning, according to the article, on recreating the entire neighborhood that surrounded it), his mother’s death in a car accident when Jean-Baptiste was twelve was the only notable incident in an otherwise mundane existence, which was so humdrum it bordered on exaggeration: childhood in a subprefecture where his father worked as an accountant, average grades, typical interests (evenings in front of the television, bike rides, several unremarkable years on a soccer team), no enduring impression burned into the memories of the teachers or classmates he’d been close to, no rebellion, no tragic love story, no through line. Several magazines tried to ascribe his self-effacing behavior to suspicious anti-social tendencies, a mystery begging illumination, but the most commonly held belief, one which still prevails today, is that an insignificant librarian, a nobody, had one day suddenly appeared over the skies of Paris.

Above the traffic jam, as crowds thickened on corners, as several passersby went to help the young woman who had fainted, and as the complete standstill of traffic unleashed the honking of cars, several ideas went through his mind. He had first, he confirmed, thought of the young woman who might be waiting for him in front of the Gare du Nord where they had agreed to meet after several weeks of timorous messages on an online dating site. He thought of calling to let her know...