He turned silent, finished his Mauresque in one go, ordered another, and looked at Jed with a mixture of reproach and melancholy. “You know,” he finally said, “Olga. She loved you.”
Jed shrunk slightly in his chair. “I mean,” Beigbeder continued, “she truly loved you.” He went silent and looked at him, nodding incredulously. “And you let her go back to Russia … And you never gave her any news … Love … Love is rare. Didn’t you know that? Have you never been told that?
“I’m speaking to you about this, although obviously it’s none of my business,” he went on, “because she’s coming back to France soon. I still have a few friends in television, and I know that Michelin is going to create a new channel on TNT, Michelin TV, centered on gastronomy, the terroir, heritage, the French landscape, et cetera. It’s Olga who’ll run it. Okay, on paper, the director general will be Jean-Pierre Pernaut; but in practice, it’s she who’ll have all the say on the programming. So there you are,” he concluded in a tone that clearly indicated the conversation was over; “you came to ask me a small favor, and I’ve done you a big one.”
He gave Jed a sharp look as he got up to leave. “Unless you think that the most important thing is your exhibition.” He nodded again and, mumbling in an almost inaudible voice, added with disgust: “Fucking artists …”
13
The Sushi Warehouse in Roissy 2E offered an exceptional range of Norwegian mineral waters. Jed opted for the Husqvarna, a water from the center of Norway, which sparkled discreetly. It was extremely pure—although, in reality, no more than the others. All these mineral waters distinguished themselves only by the sparkling, a slightly different texture in the mouth; none of them were salty or ferruginous; the basic point of Norwegian mineral waters seemed to be moderation. Subtle hedonists, these Norwegians, thought Jed as he bought his Husqvarna; it was pleasant, he thought again, that so many different forms of purity could exist.
The cloud ceiling arrived very quickly, and with it that nothingness that characterizes a plane journey above the clouds. Briefly, around halfway, he saw the gigantic and wrinkled surface of the sea, like the skin of a terminally ill old man.
Shannon Airport, however, enchanted Jed with its rectangular and clear forms, the height of its ceilings, the astonishing dimensions of its corridors. It was barely making it, and now served mostly low-cost airlines and troop transports of the American army, but it had visibly been planned for five times more traffic. With its structure of metal pillars and its short-pile carpet, it probably dated from the early 1960s or the end of the 1950s. Even more than Orly, it recalled that period of technological enthusiasm of which air travel was one of the most innovative and prestigious achievements. Yet from the early 1970s, with the first Palestinian terrorist attacks—later continued, in a more spectacular and professional manner, by those of Al-Qaeda—air travel had become an infantilizing and concentration-camp-like experience you prayed would be over as soon as possible. But at the time, thought Jed as he waited for his suitcase in the immense arrivals hall—the metal baggage trolleys, square and massive, were probably also from that time—during that surprising period of the “Thirty Glorious Years,” air travel, a symbol of the modern technological adventure, was certainly something else. Still reserved for engineers and managers, for the builders of tomorrow’s world, it was destined, and no one doubted this in the context of triumphant social democracy, to become more and more accessible to the lower classes as their purchasing power and free time developed (which, besides, finally happened, but after a detour via the ultraliberalism appropriately symbolized by the low-cost airlines, and at the price of a total loss of the prestige previously associated with this method of travel).
A few minutes later, Jed found confirmation of his hypothesis about the age of the airport. The long exit corridor was decorated with photographs of eminent personalities who’d honored the airport with a visit—essentially presidents of the United States of America and popes. John Paul II, Jimmy Carter, John XXIII, George Bush I and II, Paul VI, Ronald Reagan … none of them were missing. On arriving at the end of the corridor, Jed was surprised to notice that the first of these illustrious visitors had been immortalized by not a photo, but a painting.
Standing on the tarmac, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had left behind the small group of officials—among whom were two ecclesiastics; in the background, some men in gabardines probably belonged to the American security services. His arm stretched forward and upward—toward the crowd massed behind the barriers, you imagined—and he smiled with that cretinous enthusiasm and optimism which is difficult for non-Americans to counterfeit. That said, his face seemed Botoxed. Turning back, Jed closely examined all the portraits of eminent personalities. Bill Clinton was as chubby and smooth as his more illustrious predecessor; you had to agree that, on the whole, American Democratic presidents resembled Botoxed leches.
Returning to the portrait of Kennedy, however, Jed was led to a conclusion of a different order. Botox did not exist at the time, and the control of puffiness and wrinkles, today achieved by transcutaneous injections, was then done by the indulgent brush of the artist. Thus, right at the end of the 1950s, and even at the very beginning of the 1960s, it was conceivable to entrust the task of illustrating and exalting the memorable moments of a reign to painters—or at least to the most mediocre among them. This was undoubtedly a daub—you only had to compare the treatment of the sky with what Turner or Constable would have done; even second-class English watercolorists could do better. All the same, there was in this painting a sort of human and symbolic truth about John Fitzgerald Kennedy that was achieved by none of the photos in the gallery—even that of John Paul II, although in good shape, taken on the steps of the plane as he opened his arms wide to salute one of the last Catholic populations in Europe.
The Oakwood Arms Hotel, too, borrowed its decor from those pioneering days of commercial aviation: period advertisements for Air France and Lufthansa, black-and-white photographs of Douglas DC-8s and Caravelles piercing the limpid atmosphere, of captains in full dress uniforms posing proudly in their cockpits. The town of Shannon, Jed had learned on the Internet, owed its birth to the airport. It had been built in the 1960s on a site where no human settlement, not even a village, had ever existed. Irish architecture, as far as he could see, had no specific character; it was a mixture of maisonettes in redbrick, similar to those you might encounter in English suburbs, and vast white bungalows fronted by tarmacked parking spaces and bordered with lawns, American-style.
He more or less expected to have to leave a message on Houellebecq’s voice mail: until then they had communicated only by e-mail and, most recently, by texting; however, after a few rings, he answered.
“You’ll easily recognize the house, it’s the worst-kept lawn in the area,” Houellebecq had told him. At the time Jed had thought he was exaggerating, but the vegetation indeed was reaching phenomenal heights. He followed a flagstoned path that snaked for a dozen yards among clumps of nettles and thorns, up to the tarmacked pad on which a Lexus RX 350 SUV was parked. As you might expect, Houellebecq had taken the bungalow option: it was big and brand-new, with a tiled roof—a completely banal house, in fact, apart from the disgusting state of the lawn.
He rang the doorbell and waited for about thirty seconds, and the author of The Elementary Particles came to open the door, wearing slippers, corduroy trousers, and a comfortable fleece of undyed wool. He looked long and pensively at Jed before turning his eyes to the lawn in a morose meditation that seemed habitual.
“I don’t know how to use a lawnmower,” he concluded. “I’m afraid of the blades cutting my fingers off; it seems to happen quite often. I could buy a sheep, but I don’t like them. There’s nothing more stupid than a sheep.”
Jed followed him through rooms that had tiled floors and were empty of furniture, with moving boxes here and there. The walls were covered with a uniform off-white paper; a light layer of dust covered the floor. The house was vast, and there must�
��ve been at least five bedrooms; it wasn’t very warm, no more than sixty degrees; Jed guessed that all the bedrooms, with the exception of the one where Houellebecq slept, had to be empty.
“Have you just moved in?”
“Yes. I mean, three years ago.”
They finally arrived in a room that was a little warmer, a sort of small square greenhouse, with glass walls on three sides, what the English call a conservatory. It was furnished with a sofa, a coffee table, and an armchair; a cheap oriental carpet decorated the floor. Jed had brought two A3 portfolios; the first contained about forty photos retracing his previous career—essentially taken from his Hardware series and his Road Maps period. The second portfolio contained sixty-four photos of paintings, which represented the entirety of his pictorial production, from Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology.
“Do you like charcuterie?” the writer asked.
“Yes … Let’s say I have nothing against it.”
“I’ll go make some coffee.”
He got up swiftly and returned about ten minutes later carrying two cups and an Italian cafetière.
“I’ve neither milk nor sugar,” he said.
“No problem. I don’t take any.”
The coffee was good. The silence continued, absolute, for two or three minutes.
“I used to like charcuterie a lot,” Houellebecq finally said, “but I’ve decided to do without it. You understand, I don’t think it should be allowed for man to kill pigs. I’ve told you how much I don’t like sheep, and I persist in my view. The cow itself, and on this point I am in disagreement with my friend Benoît Duteurtre, seems to me overrated. But the pig is an admirable animal, intelligent, sensitive, and capable of sincere and exclusive affection for its master. And its intelligence is really surprising—its limits aren’t precisely known. Did you know they’ve been taught to master simple operations? Well, at least addition, and I believe subtraction among some very gifted specimens. Does man have the right to sacrifice an animal capable of rising to the basics of arithmetic? Frankly, I don’t think so.”
Without waiting for a reply, he examined Jed’s first portfolio closely. After rapidly observing the photos of nuts and bolts, he lingered, for what seemed to Jed an eternity, over the photos of road maps; from time to time, unpredictably, he turned a page. Jed looked discreetly at his watch: a bit more than an hour had passed since his arrival. The silence was total; then, in the distance, the cavernous purring of a refrigerator compressor could be heard.
“They’re just old works,” Jed finally ventured. “I just brought them to situate my work. The exhibition, well, it’s uniquely about the content of the second folder.”
Houellebecq lifted a blank look toward Jed. He seemed to have forgotten what Jed was doing there, the reason for his presence. However, obediently, he opened the second folder. Half an hour passed again before he snapped it shut and lit a cigarette. Jed noticed then that he hadn’t smoked all the time he was looking at his photographs.
“I’m going to accept,” he said. “You know, I’ve never done this before, but I knew it would happen, at one moment or other in my life. Many writers, if you look closely, have written about painters, going back centuries. It’s funny. There’s one thing I ask myself while looking at your work: Why did you give up photography? Why did you return to painting?”
Jed thought for a long time before replying. “I’m not sure I know,” he finally confessed. “But the problem of the visual arts, it seems to me,” he continued hesitantly, “is the abundance of subjects. For example, I could readily consider this radiator as a valid subject for a picture.” Houellebecq turned round quickly to look suspiciously at the radiator, as if it were going to jump with joy at the idea of being painted; nothing of the sort happened.
“I don’t know if you could do anything, on the literary level, with the radiator,” Jed insisted. “Well, I guess you could. There’s Robbe-Grillet, who simply would have described the radiator. But, I don’t know, I don’t find that particularly interesting …” He was getting bogged down, he had the feeling he was confused and maybe clumsy, he didn’t know if Houellebecq liked Robbe-Grillet or not, but above all he asked himself, with a sort of anguish, why he had turned to painting, which still, several years later, posed him insurmountable technical problems, while he had totally mastered the principles and the equipment of photography.
“Let’s forget Robbe-Grillet,” Houellebecq interjected to Jed’s great relief. “If, sometime, with this radiator, something could be done … For example, I think I read on the Internet that your father was an architect.”
“Yes, it’s true. I portrayed him in one of my paintings, the day he left his business.”
“People rarely buy this kind of radiator individually. Clients are generally construction companies, like the one your father ran, and they buy radiators by the dozen, even hundreds of them. You could easily imagine a thriller involving a big market for thousands of radiators—to equip, for example, all the classrooms of a country—and all the bribes, political interventions, the very sexy sales rep of a Romanian radiator firm. In this context, there could very well be a long description, over several pages, of this radiator and competing models.”
He was speaking quickly now, lighting cigarette after cigarette; he gave the impression of smoking to calm himself, to slow down the functioning of his brain. Jed thought fleetingly that given his firm’s activities, his father had probably been in a position to make massive purchases of air conditioners; no doubt he had.
“These radiators are made of cast iron,” Houellebecq went on excitedly, “probably in gray cast iron, with a high level of carbon, whose dangerousness has often been underlined in experts’ reports. You might consider it scandalous that this recently built house has been equipped with such old radiators, low-cost radiators in a way, and in the case of an accident—for example, the explosion of the radiators—I could conceivably turn against the manufacturers; I suppose that in a case of this kind, the responsibility of your father would have been invoked?”
“Yes, undoubtedly.”
“That’s a magnificent subject, fucking fascinating even, a genuine human drama!” the author of Platform enthused. “A priori cast iron has a small nineteenth-century workers’-aristocracy-of-the-furnaces side to it, absolutely outmoded in other words, and yet cast iron is still manufactured, not in France obviously, but rather in countries like Poland and Malaysia. Today, you could very easily retrace in a novel the journey of the iron ore, the reductive fusion of iron and metallurgical coke, the machining of the material, and finally its marketing—all that could come at the beginning of the book, like a genealogy of the radiator.”
“In any case, it seems you’d need characters …”
“Yes, that’s true. Even if my real subject was industrial processes, without characters I could do nothing.”
“I think that’s where the fundamental difference lies. As long as I was just portraying objects, photography suited me perfectly. But when I decided to take as my subject human beings, I felt I had to return to painting; I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Conversely, I can never manage to get interested in still lifes; since the invention of photography, I find it no longer makes sense. Well, that’s my personal point of view,” he concluded apologetically.
Evening was coming. Through the window, looking southward, could be made out meadows descending to the Shannon estuary; in the distance, a bank of mist floated on the water, faintly refracting the rays of the setting sun.
“For example, this landscape,” Jed continued. “Okay, I know very well that there were very beautiful impressionist watercolors in the nineteenth century; however, if I had to depict this landscape today, I would simply take a photo. If, however, there’s a human being in the scene, even if it was just a peasant repairing his fences in the distance, then I would be tempted to have recourse to painting. I know that can sound absurd; some will tel
l you that the subject has no importance, that it’s even ridiculous to want to make the treatment depend on the subject being treated, that the only thing that counts is the manner in which the painting or the photograph breaks down into figures, lines, and colors.”
“Yes, the formalist point of view. That exists among writers too; but it’s even more widespread in the visual arts, it seems.”
Houellebecq fell silent, dropped his head, then lifted his eyes to Jed; he suddenly seemed filled with sad thoughts. He got up and left for the kitchen. He came back a few minutes later, carrying a bottle of Argentinian red and two glasses.
“We’ll have dinner together, if you like. The restaurant at the Oakwood Arms isn’t bad. There are traditional Irish dishes—smoked salmon, Irish stew, pretty insipid and basic things, in fact—but there are also kebabs and tandooris; their chef’s Pakistani.”
“It’s not even six o’clock,” Jed said, astonished.
“Yes, I think it opens at half past six. You know, they eat early in this country; but it’s never early enough for me. What I prefer, now, is the end of December; night falls at four o’clock. Then I can put on my pajamas, take some sleeping pills, and go to bed with a bottle of wine and a book. That’s how I’ve been living for years. The sun rises at nine; well, with the time it takes to wash and have some coffee, it’s almost midday, so there are four hours left for me to hold out, and most of the time I manage without too much pain. But in spring it’s unbearable. The sunsets are endless and magnificent, it’s like some kind of fucking opera, there are constantly new colors, new flashes of light. I once tried to stay here the whole spring and summer and thought I would die. Every evening, I was on the brink of suicide, with this night that never fell. Since then, at the beginning of April, I go to Thailand and stay there until the end of August. Day starts at six and ends at six, it’s simpler, equatorial and administrative. It’s unbearably hot, but the air conditioning works well and it’s the dead season for tourists. The brothels are empty, but they’re still open and that suits me fine; the service remains excellent or very good.”
The Map and the Territory Page 9
