For a few minutes they discussed the art market, which was quite demented. Many experts had believed that the previous period of speculative frenzy would be followed by a calmer period, when the market would grow slowly, regularly, at a normal rhythm; some had even predicted that art would become a safe investment; they were mistaken. There are no more safe investments, as the Financial Times had recently headlined an editorial; and speculation in the domain of art had become even more intense, more disorderly, and more frenetic, with values set and revised in the twinkling of an eye, and the ArtPrice rankings now drawn up on a weekly basis.
They took another glass of wine, then a third. “I can find a buyer,” Franz finally said. “Of course, that’s going to take a bit of time. At the price you’ve reached, there are no longer many people left.”
Jed wasn’t in a hurry, anyway. Their conversation slowed down, before stopping completely. They looked at each other, with almost apologetic expressions. “We’ve known a few things … together,” Jed tried to say in one last effort, but his voice went silent before the end of the sentence. As he got up to leave, Franz told him: “You’ll have noticed that … I didn’t ask you what you were doing.”
“I did notice.”
In fact, he was going around in circles. He was at such loose ends that, for a few weeks now, he had begun to speak to his boiler. And what was more worrying—he had become aware of this two days before—was that he now expected the boiler to answer him. The machine, it’s true, produced more and more varied noises: groans, roars, loud bangs, whistles of varied tone and volume; you might expect it one day or another to reach articulated language. It was, when all was said and done, his oldest companion.
Six months later, Jed decided to move into his grandparents’ old house in the Creuse. By doing so, he was uncomfortably aware of following the same path taken by Houellebecq a few years before. He repeatedly thought, in order to persuade himself, that there were important differences. Firstly, Houellebecq had moved to the Loiret from Ireland; the true break for him had happened before, when he had left Paris, the sociological center of his activity as writer and of his friendships, one could at least suppose, for Ireland. The break that Jed was making, leaving the sociological center of his artistic activity, was of the same order. In truth, he had already more or less carried it out. In the first months after he achieved international fame, he had agreed to participate in some biennales, attend vernissages, and give numerous interviews—and even, once, to give a lecture, of which he had kept no memory whatsoever. Then he had cut down, had neglected to respond to the invitations and e-mails, and in less than two years had fallen back into this solitude that was oppressive, but in his eyes indispensable and rich, a bit like the nothingness “rich in possibilities” of Buddhist thought. Except, for the moment, that nothingness only engendered nothingness, and it was above all for that reason that he changed residence, in the hope of regaining that bizarre impulse which had pushed him in the past to add new objects, described as artistic, to the countless natural or artificial objects already present in the world. It was not, like Houellebecq, leaving in search of a hypothetical childhood state. Besides, he hadn’t spent his childhood in the Creuse, except for a few summer holidays of which he had no precise memory, just that of an indefinite, brutal happiness.
Before leaving the Paris region he had a final task to accomplish, a difficult one, which he had put off for as long as possible. A few months earlier, he had concluded the sale of the house in Raincy with Alain Sémoun, a guy who wanted to move his business there. He’d made a fortune thanks to an Internet site for downloading welcome messages and wallpaper for cell phones. That didn’t look at all like an activity, it was rather simplistic, but he’d become, in the space of a few years, the world’s number one. He’d signed exclusive contracts with numerous celebrities, and for a modest sum, by going through his site, you could personalize your phone with the image and voice of Paris Hilton, Deborah Channel, Dmitry Medvedev, Puff Daddy, and many others. He wanted to use the house as a headquarters—finding the library “hyper-classy”—and build modern workshops in the park. According to him, Raincy had a “crazy energy” he badly wanted to channel; that was his way of seeing things. Jed suspected he was overstating his interest in the rough suburbs, but he was a guy who could overstate the purchase of a six-pack of Volvic. Anyway, he had a considerable gift of the gab, and had scraped together the maximum of all the local or national subsidies available; he had almost ripped Jed off with the price of the transaction, but Jed had come to his senses, and the other man had ended up proposing a reasonable price. Jed obviously didn’t need this money, but he would have thought it unworthy of his father’s memory to sell cheaply this place where he had tried to live; where he’d tried, if only for a few years, to build a family life.
A violent wind was blowing in from the east when he took the exit for Raincy. It was ten years since he’d last been there. The gate creaked a little, but opened without difficulty. The branches of the poplars and aspens waved against a dark gray sky. The trace of a path could still be made out between the clumps of grass and the bushes of nettles and thorns. He thought with a vague horror that it was there that he’d spent his first years, even his first months, and it was as if the envelopes of time were closing upon him with a dull thud; he was still young, he told himself, he’d lived only the first half of his decline.
The closed shutters, with their white slats, bore no trace of a break-in, and the armored lock on the main door opened with astonishing ease. No doubt word had gone around in the neighboring housing schemes that there was nothing left to steal in this house, and that it didn’t even justify an attempt at burglary. That was accurate, as there was nothing—or nothing sellable. No recent electronic equipment; just heavy, unstylish furniture. His father had taken his mother’s rare jewelry with him—to the retirement home in Boulogne, then the one in Vésinet. The safe had been returned to Jed not long after his death; he’d immediately put it on top of a wardrobe, while knowing that he would be better depositing it at the local bank; if not, sooner or later, he would come across it again, and that would inevitably lead him to sad thoughts, because if his father’s life hadn’t been very happy, what could be said about his mother’s?
He easily recognized the arrangement of the furniture, the configuration of the rooms. This functional unit of human habitation, which could easily have accommodated ten people at the time of its greatest splendor, had accomodated only three—then two, then one, and in the end no one at all. He wondered for a few moments about the boiler. Never, during his childhood or adolescence, had he heard of problems with the boiler; nor during his brief sojourns, as a young man, in his father’s place had it ever been an issue. Perhaps his father had acquired an exceptional boiler, a boiler “with bronze feet, whose limbs are solid like the columns of the temple of Jerusalem,” as the holy book describes the wise woman.
Doubtless on one of those deep leather sofas, protected by the cathedral stained-glass windows from the heat of a summer afternoon, he’d read of the adventures of Spirou and Fantasio, or the poems of Alfred de Musset. He then understood that he was going to have to act quickly, and went over to his father’s office.
He easily found the portfolios, in the first cupboard he opened. There were about thirty of them, 50 by 80 centimeters, covered with that kind of paper with sad black and green motifs which systematically covered portfolios in the previous century. They were fastened by black ribbons that were worn, close to breaking, and stuffed with hundreds of A2 sheets, which must have represented years of work. He took four of them under his arm, and opened the trunk of his Audi.
When he was making his third trip, he noticed a tall black man who was observing him, on the other side of the street, as he talked on his cell phone. He was impressively built, with a shaved head—he must have been over one meter ninety, more than one hundred kilos—but his features were juvenile. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Jed supposed that Al
ain Sémoun was protecting his investment, and thought for a moment of going to explain himself, but decided against it, hoping that the description of this man would enable Sémoun to recognize him. It had to be the case, because the other did nothing to interrupt him, and just watched until he finished loading his car.
He wandered around upstairs for a few more minutes without feeling anything precise, without even remembering anything, yet he knew that he would never return to this house, which, anyway, was going to change a lot—that other moron was probably going to break down some walls and repaint everything white—but nothing happened, nothing managed to imprint itself on his mind. He walked in the limbo of an indefinite, oily sadness. On going out, he carefully closed the gate. The black man had left. All of a sudden the wind stopped again, the branches of the poplars were immobile, there was a moment of total silence. He turned back, went into the rue de l’Égalité, and easily found the entrance to the highway.
Jed wasn’t used to the elevations, plans, and cuts by which architects indicate the specifications of the buildings they are designing; also, the first artistic representation he discovered, at the end of the first portfolio, gave him a shock. It in no way resembled a residential building, but rather a sort of neural network, where inhabitable cells were separated by long curved passages, covered or in the open air, which branched out in a star shape. The cells were of various dimensions, and rather circular or oval shape—which surprised Jed; he would have imagined his father more attached to straight lines. Another striking point was the total absence of windows; on the other hand, the roofs were transparent. Thus, once they had returned home, the inhabitants of the housing scheme would no longer have any visual contact with the outside world—with the exception of the sky.
The second portfolio was devoted to detailed views of the interior of the homes. What struck him first was the virtual absence of furniture—made possible by the systematic use of small variances in the level of the floor. Thus, sleeping zones were rectangular excavations, forty centimeters deep; you descended into your bed rather than getting up into it. Similarly, the bathtubs were big round basins, the edges situated at floor level. Jed wondered what materials his father had intended using; probably plastic, he concluded, no doubt polystyrene, which through thermoforming could be adapted to almost any design.
At about nine in the evening, he heated up some lasagne in the microwave. He ate it slowly, washing it down with a bottle of cheap red wine. He wondered if his father had really believed that his projects could win financial backing, and somehow be turned into reality. At the beginning yes, no doubt, and this simple thought was already depressing, as it appeared obvious a posteriori that he had no chance. He did not seem, in any case, to have ever gone as far as the scale-model stage.
He finished the bottle of wine before plunging back into his father’s projects, feeling that the exercise was going to be more and more depressing. In fact, no doubt with his successive failures, the architect Jean-Pierre Martin had made a headlong rush into the imaginary, multiplying the levels, the ramifications, the challenges to gravity, imagining, with no concern for feasibility or budget, crystalline and improbable citadels.
At about seven in the morning, Jed started on the content of the last portfolio. Day was dawning, still vaguely, on the place des Alpes; the weather promised to be gray, overcast, probably until evening. His father’s last drawings did not look in any way like an inhabitable building, or at least one inhabitable by humans. Spiral staircases climbed vertiginously to the heavens, joining tenuous, translucent footbridges, which brought together irregular, lanceolate buildings of blinding white, whose forms reminded you of certain cirrus clouds. Basically, Jed thought sadly on closing the dossier, his father had never stopped wanting to build houses for swallows.
Jed had no illusions about the welcome he would get from the inhabitants of his grandparents’ village. He had noticed that while he was traveling through la France profonde with Olga, many years before: outside certain very touristy zones like the Provençal hinterland or the Dordogne, the inhabitants of rural zones are generally inhospitable, aggressive, and stupid. If you wanted to avoid gratuitous assaults and trouble more generally in the course of your journey, it was preferable, from all points of view, not to leave the beaten paths. And this hostility, which was simply latent toward passing visitors, transformed into hate pure and simple when the latter acquired a residence. To the question of knowing when a stranger could be accepted in a French rural zone, the response was: never. In that, they displayed no racism or xenophobia. For them, a Parisian was almost as much a stranger as a German from the north or a Senegalese; undoubtedly, they did not like strangers.
A laconic message from Franz had informed him that Michel Houellebecq, Writer had just been sold—to a Hindu cell-phone magnate. Six million extra euros had therefore just been added to his bank account. Obviously the wealth of strangers—who paid for the acquisition of a property sums that they themselves could never have imagined getting together—was one of the main motives for the natives’ resentment. In Jed’s case, the fact that he was an artist further aggravated the situation; his wealth had been acquired, in the eyes of a farmer in the Creuse, by dubious means, on the verge of swindlery. On the other hand, he hadn’t bought his property, but inherited it—and some remembered him from the times he had stayed, for several summers, in the house of his grandmother. He was then already a wild, unsociable child; and he did nothing, on his arrival, to make himself appreciated—on the contrary.
The back of his grandparents’ house looked onto a very big garden, of almost one hectare. At the time when they both lived there, it was entirely laid out as a vegetable garden—then, gradually, as the strength of his widowed grandmother declined, and she began a firstly resigned, then impatient wait for death, the cultivated areas had shrunk, more and more vegetable patches had been abandoned, surrendered to the weeds. The back, which was unfenced, opened directly onto the wood of Grandmont—Jed remembered that once a doe pursued by hunters had found refuge in the garden. A few weeks after his arrival, he learned that a plot of fifty hectares, adjoining his own, and almost entirely forested, was for sale; he bought it without hesitation.
Rapidly, word went around that a rather crazy Parisian was buying land at any price, and at the end of the year Jed found himself the owner of seven hundred hectares, all to himself. Undulating and uneven in places, his estate was almost completely covered with beeches, chestnut trees, and oak; a pond fifty meters in diameter stretched out in the middle of it. He let the cold snaps pass, then had a three-meter-high metal lattice fence built, which closed it off entirely. On top of the barrier ran an electric wire powered by a low-tension generator. The voltage was insufficient to kill, but able to repel anyone who considered climbing it—it was the same, in fact, as the electric barriers used to dissuade herds of cows from leaving their meadows. In that way, it was perfectly within the limits of legality, as he pointed out to the gendarmes who came to visit him, twice, to express concern about the changes to the face of the canton. The mayor also came, and pointed out to him that by forbidding any right of passage to the hunters who had pursued deer and wild boar in these forests for generations, he was going to arouse considerable animosity. Jed listened to him intently, agreed that it was regrettable up to a point, but argued again that he was within the strict limits of the law. Soon after this conversation, he instructed a civil engineering business to build a road that crossed his domain, ending at a radio-controlled gate that opened directly onto the D50. From there, he was only three kilometers from the entrance to the A20 motorway. He developed the habit of doing his shopping at the Carrefour in Limoges, where he was almost sure not to meet anyone from the village. He generally went there first thing on Tuesday mornings, having noticed that this was when there were the fewest customers. He sometimes had the supermarket all to himself—which seemed to him to be quite a good approximation of happiness.
The civil engineering company also
laid down, around the house, a band of gray tarmac ten meters wide. In the house itself, however, he changed nothing.
All these improvements had cost him a little more than eight million euros. He did the calculation, and concluded that he had easily enough left to live on until the end of his days—even supposing he lived that long. His main expenditure, by far, would be the wealth tax. There would be no income tax. He had no income, and in no way intended producing artworks intended for sale again.
The years, as they say, passed.
One morning, listening by chance to the radio—he hadn’t done so for at least three years—Jed learned of the death of Frédéric Beigbeder, at the age of seventy-one. He’d passed away in his residence on the Basque coast, surrounded, according to the station, by “the affection of his loved ones.” Jed had no trouble believing it. There was truly in Beigbeder, as far as he could remember, something which could arouse affection and, already, the existence of “loved ones”; something that did not exist in Houellebecq, nor in him: a sort of familiarity with life.
The Map and the Territory Page 27
