“Doctor, cemeteries are full of corpses rotting in coffins while people dressed in black stand around, trying to focus on the grieving orphans and look sympathetic. A bunch of bastards who knit their brows to make it look like they’re concerned—I feel like punching them. I have no time for empathy, or for sympathy.”
“Death makes people vicious,” she said without smiling, just to justify her salary (€120 for a thirty-minute session). “When animals sense it, they sometimes become dangerous.”
“There must be some way to solve the problem.”
“Which problem?”
“Death. Mankind has always come up with a solution. We invented electricity, the internal combustion engine, radio, television, spaceships, vacuum cleaners that don’t lose suction … By the way, I had a dream that a vacuum cleaner hoovered up my parents’ ashes which had been tipped out onto the carpet. What would Lacan have made of that?”
“A typical case of morbid delirium, aggravated by paranoid narcissistic megalomania, exacerbated by celebrity and multiple-drug dependence. What I find interesting is you attempt to remarry your parents by mingling their ashes. Was it nice, seeing them reunited in your dream?”
“Listen, science is on the point of eradicating death, and I don’t want the discovery to come after they kick the bucket. You have to admit, it would be pretty shit to die just before science discovers immortality. We need to hold out until 2050 but, based on the average life expectancy of French men, I’m scheduled to die in 2043. I’m not asking for much, just to narrow this seven-year gap. Everyone in the world wants what I want. In my dream, it felt comforting, hoovering up death. It made death disappear. I woke up feeling great. You don’t want to die, do you?”
“I’m reconciled to accepting human mortality. I can’t say I find the prospect thrilling, but I’ve learned not to rail against things I can’t change.”
“In a minute you’ll be paraphrasing Montaigne: ‘To psychoanalyze is to learn to die.’ I don’t give a shit about philosophy, or about psychoanalysis. I don’t want to learn to die, I want deal with the problem. My time is limited: I’ve got twenty-six years to defer the final deadline. Oh, and I want my family to be immortal too. Personally, I think this should be the aim of every normal human being.”
“No, to be normal is to be mortal. The countdown started the day you were born. Accept it. You can control everything but that.”
“You don’t understand where I’m coming from. You think I’m Don Quixote while actually I’m James Bond. My death is a bomb set to explode, and I have to defuse it. To music by John Barry if necessary. I don’t care if you think I’m a control freak.”
Madame Enkidu looked at me sadly, the way you might look at a homeless person holding a hand out when you’ve got no small change. Outside her window, cars honked their horns, revved their engines, spewed exhaust fumes into the street. Down in those gridlocked cars, newly minted fiftysomethings were breathing in particulate matter while listening to air-pollution warnings on France Info every five minutes. You could hear them thinking, “Shit, it’s going to be at least another hour before I get to Porte Maillot, and I’ll die in two decades. On my deathbed, I’m going to regret spending this hour in a traffic jam breathing in poison.” That’s the real mystery of modern society: why do mortal individuals accept traffic jams on ring roads?
“What I’m saying is pretty simple,” I went on, “I belong to the last mortal generation, but I want to be part of the first immortal generation. My death is just a matter of timing.”
My therapist smiled as though I had just scored 100 on the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale. She was probably considering having me sectioned and transferred to the nearest psychiatric unit. She’s used to listening to bullshit, but I’d gone too far; I was irritated to see her condescending sneer as she took notes for an upcoming book to be published by Odile Jacob. Eventually, she scribbled an address on her pad with her Montblanc, peeled off the page, and handed me the prescription.
“Okay, maybe I know someone who can help—but he’s in Jerusalem. He’s a researcher working on cell renewal. It’s worth a punt. If worst comes to worst, a vitamin cure wouldn’t hurt. Can I take a selfie with you? It’s for my niece. The stupid girl is a real fan of your show. She loved the episode where lockjaw stopped you being able to speak.”
A cloud shaped like an unknown country scudded across the sky. “Cell Renewal.” As I stepped out of the grey building it occurred to me that the crazy old bat might have put me on the right path. Having accepted her own impending death, she’d offered me a way to postpone mine. This didn’t stop me sobbing in front of a luxury travel-goods store that shall remain nameless, since I don’t want to give free advertising to Goyard. A passerby clapped me on the back and said, “Hey, you had me in stitches that time you threw up on TV! Can I get a selfie with you?” I dried my tears and posed, making the V-for-victory sign. The public always expect me to be hilarious and outrageous. They’re disappointed when they discover I’m shy and boring. Fans want to have a drink with me so they can tell their mates we got rat-arsed together. There was a point in my career when I did everything I could to live up to my reputation. I handed out drugs to strangers so they could tweet about it. I posed for shirtless selfies with a bottle in one hand and a baggie of white powder in the other. This was the night when I stopped burnishing my character as a trash-punk TV presenter, all I wanted was to be left in peace for the three centuries I had left to live.
I summoned an Uber that took fifteen minutes to find me. Do you know how I finally realized I was old? When I asked the driver to turn on the radio, the guy looked at me for a long time in the rear-view mirror and then tuned to Radio Nostalgie. I was utterly devastated: I clearly looked like a fan of Gérard Lenormand’s greatest hits. Then he dictated my address to his GPS system, which took us in the wrong direction, dropping me at the rue de Sèvres instead of the rue de Seine. The driver trusted the machine, and the machine was deaf. Or maybe robots take pleasure in humiliating us? I found it surprising that a major company such as Uber should adopt such a blatantly Nazi name. All too often, our faith in software is disappointed. Okay, there’s always some trial and error, a few failures. But we have to believe that scientific progress will one day lead humanity to ultimate freedom.
-
In Manhattan (1979), Woody Allen lists ten reasons to live:
– Groucho Marx
– Willie Mays
– the second movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony
– Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Potato Head Blues”
– Swedish movies
– Flaubert’s Sentimental Education
– Marlon Brando
– Frank Sinatra
– those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne
– the crabs at Sam Wo’s
– Tracy’s face (as played by Mariel Hemingway)
On the next page, I intend to complete this list of things that make the idea of death unbearable.
-
SUPPLEMENT TO WOODY ALLEN’S LIST OF REASONS TO LIVE
– all Woody Allen movies, except The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
– Edita Vilkevičiūtė’s breasts
– September twilight over the bay of San Sebastian, seen from Monte Igueldo
– Paul-Jean Toulet’s Les Contrerimes, especially number LXII:
Will you return to me, rivage Basque,
With vanished fortune fair
And your dances in salt air,
two eyes, ablaze behind the mask.
– Roger Federer’s backhand passing shot, especially during the fifth set of the Australian Open final in Melbourne, January 29, 2017
– the back room of Café La Palette, on the rue de Seine (listed building)
– “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed
– the (pierced) breasts of Lara Stone. He
r words on the day she got married at Claridge’s in London: “I know every room in this hotel.”
– I still have three bottles of Château de Sales 1999 in my cellar
– the songs of Cat Stevens
– Kellogg’s Frosties
– every film starring John Goodman
– “Salvator” caramels from Maison Fouquet
– lightning during a summer storm
– the beds on the first floor of Shakespeare and Co. bookshop in Paris
– “Only You” by Yazoo
– the sun’s first rays filtering through closed curtains
– let’s not forget that at some point an Italian invented tiramisu
– making love and then falling asleep listening to your lover taking a shower
– Kate Upton’s breasts as she dances to The Rej3ctz’s “Cat Daddy” in a video by Terry Richardson (2012)
– this quote from Full Metal Jacket: “The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.”
– the grounds of the Villa Navarre in Pau in autumn, when the Pyrenees veer from mauve to blue, with a warm breeze and an ice cube tinkling in a glass of Lagavulin
– “The Offshore Pirate” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
– “La rua Madureira” by Nino Ferrer
– the purring of a cat lying by a crackling fire
– the purring of a fire lying by a crackling cat (rarer)
– listening to rain drumming on the roof when you’re indoors
– when, after lovemaking, you start to get hard again
– the version of “People Have the Power” by Eagles of Death Metal with U2, live in Paris, three weeks after the Bataclan massacre
– Ricky Gervais’s monologues at the Golden Globes
– Marisa Papen’s Instagram account
– Jean-Pierre Léaud’s monologue in The Mother and the Whore
– discovering a dusty old Colette paperback with a cracked yellow spine, and reading it from cover to cover while standing in the living room
– parties that end up in my kitchen at 5:00 a.m.
– turning your laptop off
– Ashley Benson’s breasts in Spring Breakers. The scene where she spends a night in a holding cell in just a bikini. The scene in the pool where she kisses Vanessa Hudgens. Of course life is worth living.
– Paul Léautaud’s literary journals (published in three volumes by Mercure de France). Worth leafing through whenever you doubt the power of literature.
– the former French penal colony of Poulo Condor, on Con Dao Island in Vietnam, now a Six Senses five-star chain
– lying in a hammock on a hot night beneath a starlit sky and thinking about nothing
– the Musée Gustave Moreau on the rue de La Rochefoucauld, especially when you’re the only visitor
– coming in a mouth full of ice-cold Perrier
– the blue and pink hydrangeas of Arcangues when you’re waiting for a juicy mushroom omelette, surrounded by drunken friends
– the voice of Anna Mouglalis
– the places I have not visited: Patagonia, the Amazon, Lake Victoria, Honolulu, the Great Pyramids, Popocatepetl, Mount Kilimanjaro. There can be no question of me dying before I’ve sailed the Emerald River and the Black Dragon River.
– a Nestlé Milkybar
– The Big Lebowski obviously, especially the scene where John Turturro says, “Nobody fucks with the Jesus.”
– baked tagliolini with ham at Harry Cipriani on Fifth Avenue
– “Hearing the song of a little girl as she walks away having asked you for directions” (Li Bai)
– Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch
– Léonore’s breasts
– Romy’s laugh
– Lou’s flaxen hair: like downy feathers on a baby chick
I had a child at a time when I didn’t give a fuck about the future. No, correct that.
I had two daughters. Now I long for a future.
-
THE PRESS RELEASE on the Morandini website announcing that I had resigned and been replaced by Augustin Trapenard sparked a wave of reactions on social networks: a third of them were polite regrets, a third said “good riddance,” and a third were brownnosing plaudits for my replacement. The headline in Le Parisien read: “Chemistry Show Overdose.” In Voici: “Can the has-been make a comeback?” Le Figaro: “Garbage In Garbage Out.” I was forced to do an interview for jeanmarcmorandini.com to defuse the negative press.
Jean-Marc Morandini: Are you washed up, TV-wise? (laughter)
Me: I don’t know and I don’t care. Unlike some people, I have a life outside of TV. I also think TV is dying, which is why I’m planning to do a weekly radio piece on France Inter, starting in September.
JMM: This has to be a first—a presenter giving up a one-hour TV show for a three-minute slot on radio. And you’re trying to tell us it’s a promotion? (laughter)
M: Yeah, I genuinely think it is. Because I’ll be able to speak freely. And anyway, radio shows have been filmed for years now. People will be able to stream the videos online. Radio isn’t radio anymore.
JMM: Were you tired of having to swallow that shit? (laughter)
M: The reason I’m giving up is so I can look after my daughters. Here’s a riddle for you: name the one thing that doesn’t appear on primetime?
JMM: Losers? (laughter)
M: No: life. Most TV presenters are terrified of the idea of stepping down. They’re willing to present some dumb cheesy game show rather than not be on TV: look at Dechavanne, Sabatier, Nagui … I had to get out before I ended up spinning the wheel of fortune for the long-term unemployed.
JMM: Is this your midlife crisis? (laughter)
M: I’m fifty, so it isn’t midlife, it’s two thirds of the way through. And it’s not a crisis, it’s a lesson. The lesson of two thirds.
JMM: What’s the lesson of two thirds?
M: You wouldn’t understand.
JMM: How are you planning to go around the world if you’ve got a regular radio show? (laughter)
M: Pay attention, Jean-Marc, I’m about to use two highly technical terms: dual-location and RTB—that stands for “ready to broadcast.” Apologies for using industry jargon.
JMM: But you’re seriously planning to return to TV after a year? You do realize it’s not up to you, it’s up to the production companies? (laughter)
M: The largest audience for the Chemistry Show is YouTube Live. Anyone can broadcast on YouTube. We don’t need permission from Vincent Bolloré or Martin Bouygues to make television these days—or didn’t you know? Augustin is a friend, I hope he has an amazing time conducting live chemistry experiments. I’m sure he’ll enjoy it and the viewers will too. As for production companies, I’m a producer, as I know you are. I’m looking at all the options.
JMM: You haven’t answered my question. Aren’t you pissed off that the company replaced you so quickly? (laughter)
M: We’ll see how it goes. The viewers will decide. But trust is important. It’s like when a teenager auditions for a porn flick with you. An underage guy has to be pretty trusting when you ask him to jerk off in your office. (mocking smile)
JMM: You’re such a fucking dickhead. Cut! Back to the studio. You little shit! (He gets up to punch me, my bodyguards intervene)
That last joke was a cheap shot, I’m not proud. It was retweeted four million times: celebrity deathmatch of the year.
-
BACK AT HOME, I pleaded with Romy to put down her mobile phone and listen to me for five minutes. She sighed but did as I asked. I like her manners. They’re as bad as mine.
“Hang on a second,” she said. “Name an insect that stings, four letters beginning with T.”
“Tick. T, I, C, K.”
“Are yo
u sure that’s a real thing? Oh, cool, it’s right!”
In recent weeks, Romy has been playing 94%, a word game on her iPhone. I am much happier at the thought of her improving her vocabulary rather than playing Candy Crush or playing truant and hanging out in clothes shops.
“So, I’ve been thinking: how about we go on a trip together?”
“But it’s not school holidays.”
“They’re not far off. You’d only miss one month, then it’s summer. Maman has said it’s okay. I’ll write a note to your school. A real one—you won’t need to fake our signatures.”
“Ha ha, very funny. What about my friends?”
“You can email them and call them on Skype.”
“What about Lou and Léonore?”
“They’ll come and meet up with us as soon as possible. We’re going to see the ocean, the mountains, far-off lands …”
“Hang on, name a tree, six letters beginning with P?”
“Poplar? Privet?”
“It accepts both! Sixteen points!”
“We need a change of scene, it would do us good.”
Since her mother and I separated, Romy has been suppressing her emotions. It’s not fair, having to grow up so soon. I can’t bring myself to raise the subject, it’s too depressing. From time to time, I try: “You okay? You sure?”
She says nothing. Then I give her a chocolate croissant, a pack of bubble gum, or a Netflix subscription. She’s a huge fan of How to Get Away with Murder.
“To be honest, honey, I preferred it when you watched Hannah Montana.”
“Yeah, yeah, things change: these days Miley Cyrus is a skank.”
I remember a weekend we spent in Corsica when Romy asked me to put sunscreen on her back and I suddenly realized she was becoming a woman; it was the first time I felt embarrassed to touch her: my daughter was not a little girl. For the last time, I massaged the back of the little girl to whom I had given life, under the disapproving gaze of the Murtoli tourists I could hear whispering behind my back: “When is that filthy pig going to stop pawing his daughter.” There was no way I could escape this child; she was the only person who really knew me. She knew how stupid I was and she forgave me. Romy didn’t resent me for replacing her mother with a Swiss girl. This is what children are for: making adjustments. Sometimes, when she smiled, I saw her mother’s face, sometimes her grandmother’s. I restrained myself from hugging her too often so as not to smother her. Maybe I was wrong.
A Life Without End Page 8
