“Dad,” Jed said, completely distraught. “Dad.” It seemed he could no longer stop crying. “Swallows never use nests built by human hand,” Jed said very quickly, “it’s impossible. If a man so much as touches their nest, they leave it to build a new one.”
“How do you know that?”
“I read it a few years ago in a book on animal behavior—I’d done some research for a painting.”
This was untrue, he’d read nothing of the sort, but his father seemed instantly relieved and calmed down immediately. And to think, Jed thought, that he had been carrying this weight on his heart for more than sixty years … that it had probably plagued him throughout his career as an architect …
“After the baccalaureate, I matriculated at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. That worried my mother a little, she would’ve preferred that I’d gone to an engineering school; but I received a lot of support from my grandfather. I think he had an artistic ambition, as a photographer, but he never had the chance to photograph anything other than marriages and communions.”
Jed had never seen his father busy with anything other than technical problems, and at the end more and more with financial problems; the idea that his father had also gone to Beaux-Arts, that architecture belonged to the artistic disciplines, was surprising, and it made Jed uncomfortable.
“Yes, I too wanted to be an artist,” his father said acrimoniously, almost nastily. “But I didn’t succeed. The dominant current when I was young was functionalism, and in truth it had already been dominating everything for several decades. Nothing had happened in architecture since Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. All the new towns, all the housing estates that were built in the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s were marked by their influence. With a few others, at the Beaux-Arts, we had the ambition to do something different. We didn’t really reject the primacy of function, nor the notion of a ‘machine for living,’ but what we were challenging was what was meant by the fact of living somewhere. Like the Marxists, like the liberals, Le Corbusier was a productivist. What he imagined for man were square, utilitarian blocks of offices, with no decoration whatsoever, and residential buildings that were almost identical, with a few supplementary functions—nursery, gymnasium, swimming pool. Between the two were fast lanes. In his cell for living, man was to benefit from pure air and light; this was very important in his view. And between the structures of work and habitation, free space was reserved for wild nature: forests, rivers. I imagine that, in his mind, human families would be able to walk there on Sundays, but he nonetheless wanted to conserve this space, he was a sort of proto-ecologist. For him mankind had to confine itself to circumscribed modules of habitation, which were in the midst of nature, but which in no case should modify it. It’s terrifyingly primitive when you think about it, a terrifying regression from any true rural landscape, which is a subtle, complex, and evolving mixture of meadows, fields, forests, and villages. It’s the vision of a brutal, totalitarian mind. Le Corbusier seemed to us both totalitarian and brutal, motivated by an intense taste for ugliness; but it’s his vision that prevailed throughout the twentieth century. As for us, on the other hand, we were influenced by Charles Fourier …” He smiled on seeing the surprise on his son’s face. “We’ve mainly remembered the sexual theories of Fourier, and it’s true that they’re quite comical. It’s difficult to read Fourier with a straight face, with his stories of whirlwinds, fakiresses and fairies of the Rhine Army. It’s hard to believe he had any disciples, people who took him seriously, who really thought of constructing a new model of society on the basis of his books. It’s incomprehensible if you try to see him as a thinker, because his thought is completely incomprehensible, but fundamentally Fourier isn’t a thinker, he’s a guru, the first of his kind; and, as with all gurus, his success came not from intellectual adherence to a theory but, on the contrary, from general incomprehension linked with an inexhaustible optimism, especially on the sexual level: people need sexual optimism to an incredible degree. Yet Fourier’s real subject, the one which interests him above all else, isn’t sex, but the organization of production. The big question he asks is: Why does man work? What makes him occupy a determined place in the social structure and agree to stay there and carry out his task? To this question, the liberals replied that it was the lure of profit, pure and simple; we thought this was an inadequate reply. As for the Marxists, they didn’t reply at all, they weren’t even interested, and, besides, that’s what made communism fail: as soon as you got rid of the financial incentive, people stopped working, they sabotaged their task, absenteeism grew in enormous proportions. Communism never was able to ensure the production and distribution of the most elementary goods. Fourier had lived under the ancien régime, and he was conscious that, well before the appearance of capitalism, scientific research and technical progress had taken place, and that people worked hard, sometimes very hard, without being pushed by the lure of profit but by something, in the eyes of a modern man, much vaguer: the love of God, in the case of monks, or more simply the honor of the function.”
Jed’s father stopped speaking and noticed that his son was now listening to him with rapt attention. “Yes,” he commented, “there’s doubtless a rapport with what you’ve tried to do in your paintings. There’s a lot of rubbish in Fourier’s work, and overall it’s almost unreadable; there is, however, still something to be drawn from it. Well, at least that’s what we thought at the time …”
He fell quiet, and seemed to plunge back into his memories. The gusts of wind had calmed down, making way for a starry, silent sky; a thick layer of snow covered the rooftops.
“I was young,” he finally said with a sort of serene incredulity. “Maybe you can’t completely understand this, because you were born into a family that was already rich. But I was young, I was preparing to become an architect, and I was in Paris—everything seemed possible. And I wasn’t the only one. Paris was gay at the time, and you had the impression you could remake the world. It’s there that I met your mother—she was studying at the Conservatoire, she played violin. We were like a band of artists, really. Well, that was limited to writing four or five articles in an architecture review, which several of us signed. They were political texts, mainly. We defended the idea that a complex, ramified society, with multiple levels of organization, like that proposed by Fourier, went hand in hand with a complex, ramified, multiple architecture that left space for individual creativity. We violently attacked Mies van der Rohe—who made empty, multipurpose structures, the same ones that were going to be a model for the open spaces in businesses—and above all Le Corbusier, who tirelessly built concentration-camp-like spaces, divided into identical cells that were suited, we wrote, only for model prisons. These articles had a certain impact—I think Deleuze spoke about them—but we all had to work, and we entered the big architectural practices, and life immediately became much less fun. Quite quickly my financial situation improved, as there was a lot of work at the time with France rebuilding herself at high speed. I bought the house in Raincy; I thought it was a good idea, and back then it was a pleasant town. I also got it for a very good price—it was a client who put me onto it, a property developer. The owner was an old guy, visibly an intellectual, still in a gray three-piece suit with a flower in the buttonhole—every day I saw him it was a different flower. He looked like he’d stepped out of the Belle Époque, or the 1930s at the latest. I couldn’t fit him with his environment. You could’ve imagined coming across him, I don’t know, on the quai Voltaire … well, certainly not in Raincy. He was a former university professor, specializing in esoterism and the history of religions—I remember he was very clued in on the Kabbalah and gnosis, but he was interested in this in a very particular way. For example, he had nothing but contempt for René Guénon. ‘That imbecile Guénon,’ that’s how he spoke about him. I think he’d written several virulent critiques of his books. He’d never been married, he’d lived for his work, as we say. I read a long article he’d written in a social-scie
nce journal, in which he developed some quite curious considerations on fate, on the possibility of developing a new religion based on the principle of synchronicity. His library alone would have been worth the price of the house, I think—there were more than five thousand volumes, in French, English, and German. It’s there that I discovered the works of William Morris.”
He stopped on seeing a change in Jed’s expression.
“You know William Morris?”
“No, Dad. But I also lived in that house, and I remember the library …” He hesitated and sighed. “I don’t understand why you’ve waited so many years to tell me about all this.”
“It’s because I’m going to die soon, I think,” his father said simply. “Well, not straightaway, not the day after tomorrow, but it’s obvious I don’t have very long left.” He looked around him and smiled almost cheerily. “Can I have some more cognac?” Jed served him immediately. He lit a Gitane, inhaling the smoke with delight.
“And then your mother became pregnant with you. The end of her pregnancy went badly, she had to have a cesarean. The doctor informed her that she would no longer be able to have children; what’s more, she had some quite terrible scars. That was hard for her; she was a beautiful woman, you know … We weren’t unhappy together, and never had any serious arguments, but it’s true I didn’t speak to her enough. There’s the violin as well. I think she should never have stopped playing. I remember one evening at the porte de Bagnolet, I was coming back from work in my Mercedes, it was already nine o’clock but there were still traffic jams. I don’t know what triggered it, maybe the Mercuriale towers, because I was working on a very similar project, which I found ugly and uninteresting, but I saw myself in my car in the middle of these fast-entry slip roads, in front of those appalling buildings, and all of a sudden I told myself I couldn’t go on. I was nearly forty, my professional life was a success, but I couldn’t go on. In a few minutes I decided to start my own business, to try and practice architecture as I understood it. I knew it would be difficult, but I didn’t want to die without at least trying. I called on the ex-students I knew at the Beaux-Arts, but all of them had settled down—they’d succeeded too, and no longer wanted to take risks. So, I launched into it on my own. I made contact again with Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, we’d met a few years before and got on rather well, and he introduced me to people interested in free figuration: Combas, Di Rosa … I don’t know if I’ve already spoken to you about William Morris?”
“Yes, you just mentioned him five minutes ago.”
“Ah?” He stopped, and a lost expression crossed his face. “I’m going to try a Dunhill.” He took a few puffs. “It’s good as well; different from the Gitanes, but it’s good. I don’t understand why everyone has given up smoking all of a sudden.”
He savored the rest of his cigarette without speaking. Jed was waiting. Very far away outside, a solitary klaxon was trying to play “Il est né, le divin enfant” but got the notes wrong and started again; then silence returned—there was no concert of klaxons. On the roofs across Paris, the snow was now thick, stabilized; there was something definitive in this stillness, Jed thought.
“William Morris was close to the Pre-Raphaelites,” his father went on, “to Gabriel Dante Rossetti at the beginning, and to Burne-Jones right until the end. The fundamental idea of the Pre-Raphaelites was that art had begun to degenerate just after the Middle Ages, that from the start of the Renaissance it had cut itself off from any spirituality, any authenticity, to become a purely industrial and commercial activity, and that the so-called great masters of the Renaissance—be they Botticelli, Rembrandt, or Leonardo da Vinci—behaved in fact exclusively as the heads of commercial enterprises. Exactly like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst today, with an iron hand the so-called great masters of the Renaissance ruled workshops of fifty, even a hundred assistants, who chain-produced paintings, sculptures, and frescoes. They just gave general guidelines, signed the finished work, and above all devoted themselves to public relations with the patrons of the moment—princes or popes. For the Pre-Raphaelites, as for William Morris, the distinction between art and the worker, between design and execution, had to be abolished. Any man, at his own level, could be a producer of beauty—be it in the making of a painting, a piece of clothing, or furniture—and he also had the right, in his daily life, to be surrounded by beautiful objects. He allied this conviction with a socialist activism that led him to become more and more involved in movements for the emancipation of the proletariat; he wanted simply to put an end to the system of industrial production.
“What’s curious is that Gropius, when he founded Bauhaus, was on exactly the same wavelength—maybe less political, with more spiritual preoccupations, although he too was a socialist. In the Bauhaus Proclamation of 1919, he declares that he wants to go beyond the opposition between art and industry, and proclaims the right to beauty for all: exactly the aim of William Morris. But gradually, the closer Bauhaus moved to industry, the more functionalist and productivist it became; Kandinsky and Klee were marginalized within the teaching establishment, and when the institute was closed by Göring it had anyway been passed over entirely to the service of capitalist production.
“We ourselves weren’t really political, but the thought of William Morris helped us to free ourselves from the taboo that Le Corbusier had placed on any form of ornamentation. I remember that Combas had a few reservations at the start—the Pre-Raphaelite painters weren’t really his universe—but he came to agree that the wallpaper motifs designed by William Morris were very beautiful, and when he really understood what it was all about he became completely enthusiastic. Nothing could’ve given him more pleasure than to design motifs for furniture covers, wallpaper, or external friezes, used in a whole group of buildings. They were, however, quite isolated at the time, the people in free figuration; the minimalist current remained dominant, and the graffiti didn’t yet exist—or at least it wasn’t spoken about. So we put together some dossiers for all the more or less interesting projects that were up for competition, and we waited …”
His father stopped again, as if suspended in his memories, then seemed to shrink, diminish, and Jed then became aware of the élan, the enthusiasm with which he’d spoken for the last several minutes. He’d never heard him speak like this, even as a child—and never again, he immediately thought, would he ever hear him speak like this. His father had just relived, for the last time, the hopes and failures that formed the story of his life. It doesn’t amount to much, generally speaking, a human life; it can be summed up in a small number of events, and this time Jed had well and truly understood the bitterness and the wasted years, the cancer and the stress, as well as the suicide of his mother.
“The functionalists dominated all the juries,” his father concluded in a soft voice. “I banged my head against a window; we all banged our heads against a window. Combas and Di Rosa didn’t drop us immediately; in fact they phoned me for years to find out if things were freeing up … Then, seeing that nothing was coming, they concentrated on their work as painters. As for me, I ended up having to accept normal commissions. The first was Port-Ambarès—and then it built up, especially the construction of seaside resorts. I packed away my projects, they’re still in a cupboard in my office in Raincy, you can go and have a look …” He kept himself from adding “when I’m dead,” but Jed had understood completely.
“It’s late,” he said, getting up from his chair. Jed glanced at his watch: four in the morning. His father went to the toilet, then came back to put on his coat. For the two to three minutes this took, Jed had the fleeting, contradictory impression that they either had just started a new stage in their relationship, or would never see each other again. As his father finally stood in front of him with an expectant look, he said: “I’m going to call you a taxi.”
22
When he woke up on the morning of 25 December, Paris was covered with snow; on the boulevard Vincent-Auriol, he passed a beggar with a thick, hairy beard a
nd skin almost brown with filth. He put two euros in his bowl, then, turning back, added a ten-euro note. The beggar groaned in surprise. Jed was now a rich man, and the metal arches of the overground Métro stood above a softened but lethal landscape. During the day, the snow was going to melt and it would all turn into mud and dirty water; then life would start again, at quite a slow pace. Between these two high points of relational and commercial intensity that are Christmas and New Year’s Eve, an interminable week passes, which is basically downtime, until activity restarts, violently and explosively, early in the evening on the 31st.
Back home, he looked at Olga’s business card: Director of Programs, Michelin TV, avenue Pierre Ier de Serbie. She too had made it on the professional level, without particularly striving for it; but she hadn’t married, and that thought made him uncomfortable. Without thinking much about it, all those years, he’d always imagined that she’d found love, or at least a family life, somewhere in Russia.
He called late the following morning, expecting everyone to be on holiday, though that wasn’t the case: after five minutes, a stressed secretary told him that Olga was in a meeting, but that she would tell her he had phoned.
Over the next few minutes, waiting for her call, his nervousness increased. The painting of Houellebecq was facing him, standing on its easel; he’d withdrawn it from the bank that very morning. The look in the author’s eyes, much too intense, added to his unease. He got up and turned the canvas around. Seven hundred and fifty thousand euros … he thought: that made no sense. Picasso made no sense, either; even less, probably, if you could establish a grading in senselessness.
As he went to the kitchen, the phone rang. He ran to pick it up. Olga’s voice hadn’t changed. People’s voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalized physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.
The Map and the Territory Page 15
