Feeling the nausea rising, he ran out into the courtyard and vomited on a dwarf palm tree. The night was curiously mild. A few guests were already departing, including the three directors. (Where did they come from? Had they checked into the same hotel?) They were advancing smoothly, in triangular formation, and silently passed the Vendée peasants, conscious of representing power and the real world. They would have made a good subject for a painting, thought Jed, discreetly leaving the reception while behind them the stars of French television laughed and yelled. A dirty song competition was being orchestrated by Julien Lepers. Enigmatic in his midnight-blue costume, Jean-Pierre Pernaut surveyed everything impassively, while Patrick Le Lay, inebriated and browbeaten, stumbled on the cobblestones, hailing the departing Michelin directors, who didn’t turn round to look at him. A Mutation in the History of West European Television: that could have been the title of this painting Jed would never make. He vomited again, still having a little bile left in his stomach; it had probably been a mistake to mix Creole punch and absinthe.
Patrick Le Lay, his forehead bloody, crawled across the ground, having now lost all hope of rejoining the directors, who were turning the corner of the avenue Charles-de-Gaulle. The music had calmed down. From the reception rooms came the slow beat of a Savoyard groove. Jed looked to the heavens, to the indifferent constellations. Spiritual configurations of a new type were appearing; something in any case was shifting durably in the structure of the French television scene. That’s what Jed could deduce from the conversations of the guests who, having recovered their coats, were slowly moving toward the carriage entrances. He caught in passing the words “new blood” and “test run” and realized that many of the conversations had to do with Olga, who was a novelty in the French television scene. She “came from the corporation”: this was one of the most frequent comments, along with those concerning her beauty. The outside temperature was difficult to gauge, as it alternated between cold and warm. He was seized again by a spasm, and belched with difficulty on the palm tree. On getting up again, he saw Olga, dressed in a white leopard-skin coat, who gave him a worried look.
“We’re going home.”
“Home … To your place?”
Without replying she took him by the arm and led him to her car. “Fragile little Frenchman …” she said with a smile before starting the engine.
24
The first light of day filtered through the gaps between the thick, fleece-lined double curtains with scarlet and yellow motifs. Olga was breathing regularly at his side, her short nightshirt drawn up to the waist. Jed softly caressed her round white buttocks without waking her. Her body had hardly changed in ten years, but her breasts had got a bit heavier. This magnificent flower of flesh had begun to wither; and the degradation, now, would only accelerate. She was two years older than he was, and then Jed realized that he would turn forty the following month. They were almost at the midpoint of their lives; things had passed quickly. He got up and gathered the clothes strewn on the floor. He couldn’t remember undressing the night before, and it was no doubt Olga who had done it; he seemed to recall having fallen asleep once his head touched the pillow. Had they made love? Probably not, and this simple fact was already serious, because after so many years of separation they should have, or should have at least tried. His predictable absence of an immediate erection would have been too easily explained by the excessive consumption of alcohol, but she could have tried to suck him off. He didn’t remember her doing it. Maybe he should have asked? This hesitation, too, about his sexual rights, about what seemed natural and normal in the framework of their relationship, was worrying, and probably announced the end. Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave.
He closed the padded white leather bedroom door behind him, and entered a long hallway which on the right side led to other bedrooms and an office, and, on the left, reception rooms—little salons with Louis XVI moldings and hardwood floors. In the darkness intermittently lit by big shaded lamps, the apartment seemed immense. He crossed one of the salons and opened a curtain: the avenue Foch extended infinitely, abnormally wide, covered with a thin layer of frost. The only sign of life was the exhaust of a black Jaguar XJ whose engine purred by the curb. Then a woman in evening dress staggered out of a building and got in next to the driver; the car went off toward the Arc de Triomphe. A total silence fell again on the urban landscape. Everything appeared to him with an unusual clarity as a faint winter sun rose between the towers of La Défense, making the immaculate surface of the avenue sparkle. At the end of the hallway, he found himself in a vast kitchen furnished with brushed aluminum cupboards surrounding a basalt central worktop. The fridge was bare, except for a box of Debauve & Gallais chocolates and an opened carton of Leader Price orange juice. Looking around him, he noticed a coffee machine and he made himself a Nespresso. Olga was nice, she was nice and loving, Olga loved him, he repeated to himself with a growing sadness as he also realized that nothing would ever happen between them again; life sometimes offers you a chance, he thought, but when you are too cowardly or too indecisive to seize it life takes the cards away; there is a moment for doing things and entering a possible happiness, and this moment lasts a few days, sometimes a few weeks or even a few months, but it happens once and one time only, and if you want to return to it later it’s quite simply impossible. There’s no more place for enthusiasm, belief, and faith, and there remains just gentle resignation, a sad and reciprocal pity, the useless but correct sensation that something could have happened, that you just simply showed yourself unworthy of this gift you had been offered. He made another coffee, which definitively dispelled the mists of sleep, then thought of leaving Olga a note. “We must think,” he wrote, before crossing that out and scribbling: “You deserve better than me.” He crossed out that sentence too, and wrote, “My father is dying,” then realized that he’d never mentioned his father to Olga, and scrunched up the paper before throwing it in the garbage. He would soon be the same age his father had been when he was born; for his father, having a child had meant the end of all artistic ambition and, more generally, the acceptance of death, as for most people, no doubt, but in his father’s case more particularly so. He went back down the hallway to the bedroom, where Olga was still sleeping peacefully, huddled up. He stayed for almost a minute, attentive to her regular breathing, incapable of achieving any kind of synthesis, and suddenly he thought again of Houellebecq. A writer must have some knowledge about life, or at least make you believe that he does. One way or another, Houellebecq had to be part of the synthesis.
It was broad daylight now, but the avenue Foch was still just as deserted. Never had he spoken of his father to Olga, nor of Olga to his father, no more than he had spoken of them to Houellebecq and Franz. He had certainly maintained the residue of social life but this hardly constituted a network or an organic tissue or anything truly alive. You were dealing simply with an elementary and minimal graph lacking interconnections, made up of independent and dry branches. Back home, he put the writer’s portrait in a titanium case, which he secured to the roof rack of his Audi Sport Wagon. At the porte d’Italie, he took the direction of the A10 motorway.
As soon as he was past the outer suburbs and the last storage depots, he noticed that the snow had settled. The outside temperature was below freezing but the heater worked perfectly—and a uniform mildness filled the interior. Audis characterize themselves by a particularly high level of finishing which can be rivaled only, according to Auto-Journal, by certain Lexus models. This car was the first one he’d bought since reaching a new wealthy status; from his first visit to the dealer, he’d been seduced by the rigor and precision of the metal assemblages, the gentle click of the doors when he closed them, all that was machine-tooled like a safe. Turning the speed-regulator control, he opted for a cruising speed of 105 km per hour. Some small notches, marking every 5 kpm, made driving all the smoother; this car was indeed perfect. A layer of untouched snow covered t
he horizontal plain; the sun was shining valiantly, almost gaily, on the sleepy Beauce. Just before Orléans, he took the E60 in the direction of Courtenay. A few centimeters below the surface of the soil, some seeds awaited germination, awakening. The journey was going to be too short, he realized. It would have taken hours, even entire days on the motorway at constant speed to begin to sketch a clear thought. However, he forced himself to stop at a service station, and on starting off again thought that he had to phone Houellebecq to warn him of his arrival.
He left at Montargis Ouest, parked about fifty yards before the motorway tollbooths, dialed the writer’s number, and let it ring a dozen times before hanging up. The sun had disappeared, and the sky was now a milky white above the snowy landscape. The dirty-white tollbooths completed this symphony of light tones. He got out and was struck by the cold, which was much sharper than in urban areas, and walked for a few minutes on the tarmac of the hard shoulder. Noticing the titanium case tied to the roof of his car, he suddenly remembered the motive of his journey and imagined he would finally be able to read Houellebecq after it was all over. After what was over? At the same time as he asked the question, he answered it, and he understood that Franz had got it right: Michel Houellebecq, Writer would be his last painting. No doubt he would have other ideas for paintings, daydreams about paintings, but never again would he feel the energy or motivation necessary to give them form. You can always take notes, Houellebecq had told him when talking about his career as a novelist, and try to string together sentences; but to launch yourself into the writing of a novel you have to wait for all of that to become compact and irrefutable. You have to wait for the appearance of an authentic core of necessity. You never decide to write a novel, he had added; a book, according to him, was like a block of concrete that had decided to set, and the author’s freedom to act was limited to the fact of being there, and of waiting in frightening inaction for the process to start by itself. At that moment Jed understood that inaction, more than ever, would cause him anguish, and the image of Olga floated back into his memory like the ghost of a thwarted happiness; if he’d been able to, he would’ve prayed for her. He got back in his car, started off slowly toward the tollbooths, and took out his credit card to pay.
It was almost midday when he reached Houellebecq’s village, but there was no one in the streets. Was there ever anyone in the streets of this village? It was an alternation of limestone houses, with ancient tiled roofs, which must have been typical of the region, and others with whitewashed half-timbering, which you would have expected to find instead in the Normandy countryside. The church, with its ivy-clad flying buttresses, bore the traces of a thorough renovation; here, manifestly, they didn’t take heritage lightly. Everywhere there were ornamental bushes and lush lawns; brown wood signs invited the visitor to take an adventure vacation on the edge of the Puisaye. The multipurpose cultural center offered a permanent exhibition on local crafts. For a long time there had probably been only second homes here.
The writer’s house was situated a little outside the village; his directions had been exceptionally clear once Jed had managed to get him on the phone. He’d just taken a long walk with his dog, he said, a long walk in the frozen countryside, and he was delighted to invite him for lunch.
Jed parked at the gate in front of a vast L-shaped farm building, with limewashed walls. He detached the case containing his painting, then rang the doorbell. There was sudden barking in the house. A few minutes later, the door opened and a big, hairy black dog rushed out to the gate, still barking. The author of The Elementary Particles appeared in turn, wearing a sheepskin jacket and velvet trousers. He had changed, Jed realized. More robust, probably more muscular, he walked energetically, a welcoming smile on his lips. At the same time he had become thinner, his face was finely wrinkled, and his hair, cut very short, had gone white. He was, thought Jed, like an animal that had put on its winter coat.
A fire was roaring in the living-room hearth, and they sat down on bottle-green sofas. “Some original furniture was left,” said Houellebecq. “I bought the other things from an antiques dealer.” On a coffee table he had put out some sliced sausage and some olives, and he now opened a bottle of Chablis. Jed took the portrait out of its case and rested it against the back of the sofa. Houellebecq looked distractedly at it, then glanced around the room. “Above the fireplace would be good, don’t you think?” he asked finally. It was the only thing that seemed to interest him. It’s maybe good this way, Jed thought. What is a painting, basically, but a particularly expensive piece of furniture? He was sipping his wine.
“Do you want to look around?” Houellebecq asked. Of course, Jed agreed. He liked the house, which reminded him a little of his grandparents’; but of course all these traditional country houses are more or less alike. Outside the living room there was a big kitchen, extended by a storeroom that also served as a woodshed and a cellar. The doors of two bedrooms opened on the right. The first one, unoccupied but furnished with a narrow and high double bed, was freezing. In the second one there was a single bed, a cot, set in a cozy corner, and a writing desk with a roll top. Jed made out the titles of the books in the shelf in the corner, near the head of the bed: Chateaubriand, Vigny, Balzac.
“Yes, that’s where I sleep,” confirmed Houellebecq as they returned to the living room, and sat down again in front of the fire. “In my old cot … You end where you began,” he added with an expression that was difficult to interpret (satisfaction? resignation? bitterness?). Jed could think of no appropriate comment to make.
After the third glass of Chablis, he felt overcome by a light torpor. “Lunch is ready,” said the writer. “I made a pot-au-feu yesterday, it will be better today. It heats up very well, pot-au-feu.”
The dog followed them into the kitchen and curled up in a big cloth basket, sighing with pleasure. The pot-au-feu was indeed good. The grandfather clock ticked softly. Through the window could be made out meadows covered with snow and, on the horizon, a copse of black trees.
“You’ve chosen a peaceful life,” said Jed.
“We’re approaching the end; we’re aging peacefully.”
“Do you no longer write?”
“At the start of December, I tried to write a poem about birds—almost at the moment when you invited me to your exhibition. I’d bought a bird feeder and left out bits of fat for them; it was already cold, winter had come early. They showed up in great numbers: chaffinches, bullfinches, robins. They greatly appreciated the bits of fat, but from there to writing a poem … Finally, I wrote about my dog. It was the year of P’s, so I called my dog Plato, and I wrote a good poem; it’s one of the best poems ever written about Plato’s philosophy—and probably also about dogs. It will be one of my last works. Perhaps the very last.”
At that same instant, Plato stirred in his basket, his paws beat the air, and he made a long groan in his dream, before settling down again.
“Birds are nothing,” Houellebecq went on, “just small living spots of color who sit on their eggs and devour thousands of insects while fluttering pathetically here and there. A busy and stupid life, entirely devoted to the devouring of insects—and with, occasionally, a modest feast of larvae—and the reproduction of the same. A dog already carries within it an individual destiny and a representation of the world, but his drama has something undifferentiated about it that’s neither historical nor even genuinely narrative. I think I’ve more or less finished with the world as narration—the world of novels and films, the world of music as well. I’m now only interested in the world as juxtaposition—that of poetry and painting. Do you want a little more pot-au-feu?”
Jed declined the offer. Houellebecq took out of the fridge a Saint-Nectaire and an Époisses, cut some slices of bread, and opened another bottle of Chablis.
“It’s nice of you to bring me this painting,” he added after a few seconds. “I’ll look at it sometimes. It’ll remind me I had an intense life—sometimes.”
They went back i
nto the living room to have some coffee. Houellebecq added two logs to the fire, then went away to busy himself in the kitchen. Jed went back to examining the bookcase, and was surprised by the small number of novels—classics, essentially. However, there was an astonishing number of books by social reformers of the nineteenth century: the best known, like Marx, Proudhon, and Comte, but also Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Pierre Leroux, Owen, Carlyle, as well as others whose names meant almost nothing to him. The author came back, carrying on a tray a cafetière, some macaroons, and a bottle of plum eau de vie. “You know what Comte asserts,” he said, “that mankind’s dead outnumber the living. Well, I agree with him now. Above all I’m in contact with the dead.” Jed couldn’t find anything to say in reply to that. An old edition of Tocqueville’s Memoirs was lying on the coffee table.
“He was an astonishing case, Tocqueville,” the writer continued. “Democracy in America is a masterpiece, a book of unheard-of visionary power, which innovates absolutely, in every domain; it’s undoubtedly the most intelligent political book ever written. And after producing this astounding work, instead of continuing, he devotes all his energy to being elected deputy for a modest arrondissement of the Manche, then taking responsibilities in the governments of his day, just like an ordinary politician. And yet he had lost nothing of his acuity, his powers of observation.” He leafed through the Memoirs while stroking the back of Plato, who had stretched out at his feet. “Listen to this, when he talks about Lamartine! Ah, he really goes after Lamartine! …” He read, in a pleasant and well-accentuated voice: “ ‘I do not know if I have ever met, in this world of selfish ambitions in which I have lived, a mind as empty of thought for the public good as his. I have seen a crowd of men trouble the country for self-aggrandizement; but he is the only one, I believe, who seemed to me always ready to change the world for personal entertainment.’
The Map and the Territory Page 17
