Alice Asks the Big Questions

by Laurent Gounelle

  It reminded her of a funny cartoon by Voutch: a person dressed as a Buddhist monk climbing up a mountain while saying, “I want to learn humility! I want to become the number-one world champion of humility!”

  She turned again toward the window, but the platform was rising to the higher floors, leaving her alone in her luxurious office on the fifty-third floor of the Montparnasse Tower, as the window cleaner rose toward the heavens.

  17

  The phone rang. It was Paul.

  “I’m calling from the house, darling.”

  “What are you doing at home at this hour? It’s not even six o’clock.”

  “I just got out of a meeting that was nearby. I didn’t want to have to cross Paris again during rush hour.”

  “Great, then you can take care of Théo tonight! I’ve been invited to a gallery opening after work and thought I wouldn’t be able to go!”

  “Okay,” he said, without much enthusiasm. “Will you be getting home late?”

  “I’ll just have a quick look around, since I’ve actually been invited out for once.”

  “Okay. But I have to tell you something. Get this: Just as I got home, I ran straight into Rosetta, who was leaving. And you know what she was carrying? An enormous package of detergent!”

  “Uh…”

  “I remembered how stressed you were about her pilfering. I caught her in the act, and it was too good an opportunity to miss. I fired her on the spot. In any case, that was the best possible solution: we won’t have to pay for her vacation! So it’s over and done with. Do you feel better?”

  “No, wait—”

  “She protested, as you can imagine, but her story would never hold up. She’s finished. We got rid of her.”

  “Actually—”

  “I’ll tell you anyway, it will make you laugh: she insisted that it was a gift from you, a souvenir from Burgundy! I stopped myself from laughing so I could continue to pretend to be offended!”

  “Paul, she was telling the truth.”

  A long silence on the other end of the line.

  “I don’t understand you at all, Alice.”

  Alice suddenly felt very alone. How could she explain it to him?

  “Alice, what’s all this craziness?”

  “Well…you’re going to laugh at me, but…I just wanted to follow Jesus’s teaching to see what happened. The one that says: ‘And if anyone wants to take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.’”

  Silence.

  “You’ve become very strange, Alice.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Alice pushed open the door to the Mag Daniels Gallery, an art gallery on the Rue de Seine that was very in vogue. There were already a fair number of people inside. A Who’s Who of the Saint-Germain crowd seemed to be there, all holding glasses of champagne, and Alice felt flattered to have been invited.

  She crossed the gallery amid animated conversations, the scent of expensive perfumes, and sophisticated outfits worn with great nonchalance. At the back of the room, the artist was perched on the edge of a table, dressed all in black. He was listening to a woman who was probably telling him how much she admired his work. Alice took a glass of champagne and made her way through the glittering crowd to try to see the paintings. The guests seemed more interested in their own analysis of the works than the works themselves. Among them, a man in his fifties was strutting around like a peacock, talking louder than everyone else, and putting on airs. People seemed to be paying attention and even flattering him.

  Alice walked around the exhibition. The artist was consistent in his style: his paintings were all large and composed of a single dark background color—blue, brown, or black—and a series of vertical, parallel lines of varying thickness in turquoise, lemon yellow, and even raspberry pink. They weren’t unpleasant—they looked like stylized, colorful bar codes.

  Alice picked up little bits of conversations here and there, and it was entertaining, a real little theater of smugness. It all ended up—despite everything—resembling a barnyard: this one meowed his credentials, that one chirped with self-importance, another cooed inspired commentary, yet another stamped the ground with criticisms meant to elevate himself above the person he was destroying. And when someone in the group stood out because they had a few ideas on the history of art, the others nodded in a knowing way: in the kingdom of morons, the pedants ruled.

  She walked by the woman who was talking to the artist and overheard her telling him about her own paintings.

  The dance of the vanities was in full swing. The ego was everywhere, ruling supreme over the evening. Alice had the impression that absolutely no one was simply being themselves. They were all putting on airs, playing a role, practicing their mannerisms, facial expressions, and remarks, and pretending to be moved. They hid behind their egos to the point of disappearing altogether. As if they no longer existed, as if they were…dead, replaced by some parasite that had invaded their minds and taken possession of their gestures, their speech, their souls.

  Alice thought of Jesus. She hadn’t understood when he had used the term “death” in sayings where it seemed out of place, as in “Whoever hears my word…has crossed over from death to life.” She remembered having found that ridiculous—she was very much alive even before hearing his words.

  But what if Jesus meant the same thing as her, seeing people devoured by their egos as dead? And besides, thinking about it, Jesus himself seemed free of all ego, even if he never used the word. Others called him the Messiah, a Prophet, the Son of God, or even King of the Jews. Not him. He never gave himself any title at all. He simply called himself the “son of Adam,” sometimes translated as the “son of man”—like all men! It was as if he refused to identify himself with anything at all, refused to be considered important. Or as if he wanted to lead by example.

  The more illustrations that came to mind, the more Alice felt troubled.

  Healing the sick! Most of the time, Jesus accomplished this alone, with no one watching, asking the crowd to leave, and even demanding that no one mention it, that no one repeat what they had seen. He obviously rejected fame and glory.

  Alice saw the link with her own experience at Hermès, with the enlightenment she had felt when trying to put into practice his saying “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you.” What if Jesus meant that you find happiness when you free yourself from your ego?

  “Normally, pretty women are introduced to me. The old ways are dying out. What’s your name, my dear?”

  Alice looked up. It was the man she’d seen strutting around a few minutes earlier.

  “Alice.”

  He passed a lecherous look across her breasts, then her stomach, then her crotch. She felt like a piece of meat.

  “What a delightful name. What do you do for a living, my dear?”

  She hesitated for a few seconds, then looked him straight in the eye.

  “I’m a window washer.”

  “Oh, oh!” He chuckled, incredulous.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  She saw his expression change from disbelief to doubt as he sized her up more closely.

  “No, no, I’m not laughing.”

  He gave her an embarrassed, slightly condescending smile. She had the feeling that he was about to turn and walk away.

  “What about you? Who are you?”

  After the first instant, when she had felt demeaned by saying that she had quite a menial job, Alice now was enjoying—how could she put it—a kind of freedom. She had nothing to lose, no status to defend, no role to play that would correspond to the image she usually projected as a PR consultant.

  He gave a little scornful laugh. “You’re probably the only person here who doesn’t know, my dear. I’m an art critic.”

  One of the women guests, who had been buzzing around him like a fly, came to stand next to Alice, smiling at him: “He’s the one who calls the shots in the art market.”

  “So that’s what you do,” Alice said, lookin
g him straight in the eye. “But I asked you who you are, not what you do.”

  “Well…but…” He seemed disconcerted by her words.

  He raised his chin higher and higher, as if he were trying to hoist himself above her.

  “You don’t know who you are?”

  “But…I am Antoine Dupont!” he said in a self-righteous tone of voice. “Everyone knows me.”

  His fans agreed.

  Alice looked around the room. No one was interested in the paintings anymore.

  Alone, forgotten, slumped in a baroque armchair upholstered in fluorescent colors at the back of the gallery, the painter was licking his wounds and playing at being the misunderstood artist.

  Alice made a face. “And if your parents had given you a different first name, or if they themselves had inherited another last name, you wouldn’t be Antoine Dupont. But would you be someone else?”

  He was becoming more and more disconcerted.

  “No…of course not,” he finally stammered.

  Alice stared straight at him.

  “So who are you, really, in the end, if you aren’t Antoine Dupont?”

  18

  When you unclothe yourselves and are not ashamed, and take your garments and trample on them, then…you will no longer be afraid.

  Alice closed her Bible, whose Civil Code cover was partly torn, and took a deep breath.

  She remembered having laughed a lot the first time she read that sentence.

  Now she could read a unique message between the lines. Jesus seemed to be saying that it was shame that led us to wear clothing, and that by learning to take it off, we would be liberated from fear. But Jesus didn’t walk around stark naked! So the word “clothing” couldn’t be taken literally. It was surely a metaphor, like the ones Jesus often used, and Alice couldn’t help but think it referred to the ego. “Clothing” probably meant the false identities we wore like veils that masked who we were, the false images we assigned ourselves by identifying with a role, a profession, our appearance, or our skills. And Jesus gave a reason for that: shame.

  A little farther away, Rachid was at his desk, completely absorbed in his computer screen. Alice, lost in thought, turned toward the window and looked out into the distance, beyond the clouds that filled the Parisian sky.

  Shame.

  Of course.

  It’s shame over who we naturally are, beyond anything we can do or reveal to the world, it’s the fear of never being good enough that leads us to take on roles, embellish our abilities, and defend them tooth and nail, because they protect us from the nakedness of our identity, which we believe—and wrongly so—not to be good enough.

  Alice took another deep breath.

  Jesus promised that by freeing ourselves from all those artifices, we would be free of fear. Perhaps because we would then realize the value—the infinite value—of our being, without needing to do or display anything. To be without pretending. Just to be.

  Isn’t that what she had experienced at Hermès?

  She smiled when she remembered that in mythology, Hermes, Zeus’s messenger, was most notably the link between the world of the gods and the earthly world.

  A few years ago she had visited Greece and had been very intrigued to learn that there was a second maxim on the pediment of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. The entire world had learned “Know thyself,” but everyone seemed to have forgotten “Everything in moderation.” She’d never heard anyone talk about it.

  At the time, that saying had struck her as mysterious. Today, she understood it better. “Know thyself” and “Everything in moderation” invited people to become themselves again and not see themselves as who they are not.

  Outside the office window, the clouds began to slowly drift away.

  After discovering the similarities between Jesus and Lao Tzu, Alice could now see how close they were to the dictums of the wise men of ancient Greece, several centuries before Christ. Everything seemed to converge.

  There must be a kind of cosmic truth, some universal wisdom about being freed from the ego that spread across centuries and continents but without managing to reach people. As if humans unconsciously filtered the messages intended for them, to avoid hearing the ones that questioned their egos.

  At this point in her discoveries, Alice suspected it was perhaps her ego that was responsible for most of her personal problems and day-to-day difficulties.

  She had never perceived that wisdom through Christianity, despite Jesus’s messages, which she had only just begun to decipher. To be fair, she had started setting foot in church only a few months ago! She couldn’t really consider herself an expert. But when she thought of her Catholic friends, the spirituality of the least observant often seemed to boil down to a few minor restrictions, like not eating meat on Good Friday. The spirituality of the most observant involved a lot of restrictions—not to make love before marriage, not to commit the sins of gluttony, sloth, envy, or wrath—which led them to feel guilty for just about everything!

  She hadn’t seen anything in their practices related to liberation from the ego. It mainly resembled a moral code. She found it difficult to understand how that could raise someone’s level of spirituality.

  Alice felt that liberation from the ego was the key to something else that was more spiritually beneficial, like a door that opened to another world—a world she had only just begun to explore.

  She wanted to go further in that direction, but how? She was blocked by the limitations of her plan: putting Jesus’s words into practice to experience them herself had worked until now, but how could she experiment with precepts like “Happy are the poor in spirit” or abstaining from sin? Play the fool for a month and you’ll lose your job. Two months of chastity and you’ll end up divorced.

  The poor in spirit…Alice recalled the very similar expression used by Lao Tzu: “simple of spirit.” In the end, she had not made much effort to shed light on these troubling parallels. Her disappointing encounter with the Taoist monk had thwarted her enthusiasm. Perhaps she should have continued on in that direction. Perhaps that ancient philosophy contained the key to understanding Jesus’s messages.

  “You don’t know any Taoists, by any chance, do you?”

  Rachid looked up. “Never met any.”

  “Or know someone else who does?”

  He frowned. “Um…No, I don’t…”

  “Or know someone who knows someone who knows any?” she said, laughing.

  “No. The only person who comes to mind is Raphaël Duvernet, the expert on Eastern religions.”

  “Raphaël Duvernet? Isn’t he dead?”

  Rachid burst out laughing. “In a way, yes! But he’s still around, I think. I asked him to speak at a company conference just before he fell from grace. I have his contact details if you want them.”

  A few years before, the expert in question had been caught up in a scandal while at the height of his fame, a time when his books on spirituality sold in the millions and he was the darling of the media. His wife at the time, probably frustrated that he cheated on her with everyone in sight, had revealed everything: Raphaël Duvernet, respected and seen as virtually a mystic, was egotistical and neurotic, tyrannical with his entourage, prepared to go to any lengths to appear on television, and, to top it all off, he used ghostwriters to make sure he published two books a year and thus cornered the market on East Asian wisdom.

  “And what’s more, he lives near you,” Rachid added.

  “Near Bastille?”

  “No, in Burgundy.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all. Monsieur has a château. The life of an ascetic, don’t you know.”

  The following weekend, Alice was crossing the drawbridge of an enormous medieval château, hidden away on an estate with hundred-year-old trees, near a village in the Mâcon region, twenty or so kilometers from Cluny. She walked under a kind of archway and found herself in a garden surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped outer wall. A few rows of poorly ke
pt box hedges surrounded the flower beds. It was meant to resemble a French garden, but the grass was too long.

  Alice headed for a large studded door made of old oak that looked like the main entrance. Since there was no bell, she lifted the heavy cast-iron door knocker and banged it three times.

  She almost expected a knight in armor to open it, but it was only an unassuming woman who looked tired and sad. A servant? A member of the family?

  “Come in. He’s in the wine cellar,” she said in a timid voice after Alice had introduced herself. “Go on, it’s that way.”

  She pointed to a dark spiral staircase that seemed to plunge down into the bowels of the fortress.

  “I’d rather wait until he comes back up. If you would just let him know…”

  The woman looked over at a man whose body and features appeared emaciated. At first, Alice hadn’t noticed him standing in the shadows. He slightly shrugged his shoulders without replying, his eyes glazed over.

  “He probably won’t come upstairs soon,” the woman said with a sigh. “You’d be better off going downstairs to see him.”

  Alice hardly wanted to do that.

  She hesitated. Her hosts gave her a suspicious look. Their faces were colorless and their eyes sunken.

  She slowly started down the stone staircase, whose steps were unevenly worn by the passage of time. The deeper she descended, the damper the air became. Once at the bottom of the stairs, she continued down a long passageway with vaulted ceilings of gray stone, dimly lit by lamps resembling the old tarnished copper lanterns that were once used on horse-drawn carriages.

  The passageway ended in an immense wine cellar, also with vaulted ceilings but where the light from stately wrought-iron wall sconces created a warmer atmosphere, despite the stone walls and dirt floor. Dozens and dozens of large barrels were lined up in rows. At the back, an immense Persian carpet covered the floor, and on it stood an oak wine-tasting table surrounded by rather unexpected Louis XIII armchairs covered in red velvet. About thirty glasses were set out on the table.