The tattooist is a fan of techno. Preferably hardcore – a thought-crushing jackhammer. A deranged drum machine accompanied by two notes on a synthesiser, on a loop, for hours at a time. Dopalet politely asked if he could listen to music that suited him – he had brought the soundtrack to “Tous les matins du monde”, he loves Marin Marais. But the tattooist insisted that it made him “emo”. This was the word he used. Marin Marais made him “emo”. How are you supposed to respond to that? Dopalet packs away his euphonious utopias and he endures the moron’s hideous cacophony without protest.
It was his son, Antoine, who discovered this paragon of the tattooist’s art. Told Dopalet he was a virtuoso. Praised his talent and his discretion. The guy is Polish. He has the face of a serial killer. Come to think of it, the guy probably can’t even read French. This makes it less likely that he’ll go around telling stories about the guy who showed up at his place with RAPIST tattooed in huge letters on his back. That said, from the look of him, he probably wouldn’t see it as an insult. Maybe he thought Dopalet had been banged up for a long stretch and was forcibly tattooed by another inmate. When he first saw the scale of the catastrophe, the guy simply shook his head and gave Dopalet a knowing look. Having taken endless measurements, the shrewd bastard suggested they start with a few laser sessions to remove as much as possible before covering it over. Beneath that moronic exterior, the guy has a Machiavellian business sense: he invested in a laser tattoo-removal machine and set it up in his shop. He has a finger in every pie and charges a fortune for the removal sessions. The machine apparently costs an arm and a leg . . . In terms of pain, tattoo removal is like being skinned alive, a real picnic. The Pole swore that, by doing it this way, none of the original tattoo would be visible. It has to be said that things are beginning to take shape. The tattooist has copied the design chosen by Dopalet from the Hokusai exhibition catalogue: a Samurai fighting a huge dragon. The two are entwined, locked in furious battle. The drawing is not by Hokusai, but it was included in the exhibition at the Grand Palais. The tattooist had recommended a bold statement piece and Dopalet immediately thought of this illustration, which had struck him as he was trudging through the crowds drawn by the works of the Japanese master. This is his life – a merciless battle struggle against super-powerful enemies. The time has come for him to slay his demons. To stop being afraid. But when he chose this illustration, he did not realise that every detail, every tiny scale of the beast, every faint shadow on the warrior’s armour, would be inscribed onto his skin with agonising pain. And the worst is yet to come: the whole thing has to be coloured. Sometimes he whimpers and the tattooist tenses, as though his concentration has been disturbed. So Dopalet conjures pleasurable images, he pictures his torturer being plunged into boiling oil, very slowly, starting with the toes and ending with his neck. It helps. But it is not enough.
Antoine says that the Pole is an artist acclaimed at international conventions. He was always like that, even as a child. He has a knack for saying things that make you want to slap him. “Internationally acclaimed”, my arse. Dopalet had had no intention of telling his son what had happened that night at his apartment. They are not close enough for him to confide such a thing. The producer would rather lick his wounds in private. He knows his son thinks he is indestructible, still feels a childlike hero worship for his father – something that can make him aggressive at times. With Antoine, you’re always worried that he’ll get up on his high horse and start spouting moralistic claptrap. Antoine loves to hold forth like an intellectual, problem is that in their family they have no intellectual grasp of abstract ideas, so he ends up babbling inanely and making himself look ridiculous. Antoine would have been quite capable of launching into a defence of the two airheads who assaulted Dopalet in his home, arguing that they weren’t sent on tropical holidays when they were young or they were given short rations of chips at the school canteen. Antoine frequently gives the impression that he is still trapped in the socialist daydreams of the ’80s – a decade he’s too young to remember. But what Dopalet really feared was that the boy might insinuate that his father had done something to warrant such a punishment. Antoine is not clannish. He is incapable of siding with his father for the simple reason that they are flesh and blood. He’s an ungrateful brat. Children, Christ, who’d have them? You pay for the best schools, you let them use your contacts, you buy them a little apartment, and they talk to you like you molested them throughout their childhood . . .
But, for once, Antoine behaved like a dutiful son. He sensed that his father was vulnerable, and, rather than taking advantage of the fact to berate him, he turned the incident into a moment of comforting intimacy. He came by regularly to see him, he was concerned and attentive. So Dopalet opened up to him. And his son was not callous. On the contrary, he showed great empathy. So much so that his father agreed to unbutton his shirt and show him the unspeakable wound. No-one had seen his back since the incident, no-one except his wife on those first nights when she disinfected it. He sleeps in his T-shirt. He puts on a dressing gown as soon as he steps out of the shower. He no longer takes off his shirt. No more going to hotel saunas, or the swimming pool at Hotel Costes, no more jetting off to the Canary Islands in February . . . These days, if he has a one-night stand, he fucks with his shirt on. But he confided in his son, he allowed himself to be vulnerable. And it had been the right decision. Antoine had said, omigod, Papa, that’s terrible. Not a single indelicate question. He treated his father as a victim, someone who should not be expected to explain the assault perpetrated on him. It was a touching moment. And it was his son who had come up with this brilliant idea – you have to get it covered up. It was obvious. But the idea had not occurred to Dopalet. The assault had left him so shaken up. For the first time, the son had been able to support his father. Even if Dopalet has to go through hell every fortnight, even if he curses this fucking tattooist, he is conscious that he is no longer passive, no longer a victim. And, in a few weeks, he will have recovered his dignity. He will have earned it. The hard way.
*
After the trauma, Dopalet was devastated. The home invasion, being held hostage, the acts of torture . . . He wasn’t the same man. He couldn’t sleep. He had to move out of the apartment. He no longer felt safe at home. It was months before he managed to sleep through the night. The slightest sound made him jump. He suffers from terrible tinnitus, as though a swarm of demented cicadas were following him everywhere, which means he can no longer tolerate silence. His whole temperament has changed. He has lost his gung-ho enthusiasm. He finds it difficult to concentrate. He can’t read anymore. At the office, he has had to recruit someone to read the film scripts he needs to be familiar with.
He has uncontrollable bursts of rage. The panic attacks he had learned to keep in check have become unmanageable. Something in him was broken that night. He knows that if someone were to study the map of his brain, they would discover whole neuronal areas have been devastated, as though he had suffered a brutal head injury. He has been to see specialists. He tells them that his home was burgled while he was there alone. He doesn’t say that it was an act of revenge, the two girls broke into his apartment intending to kill him, that they believed he was guilty and had come in search of justice. He said, I thought I was going to die I was tied up I couldn’t do anything I think my brain exploded. The therapists take him seriously. Any good shrink knows that a burglary is a profound emotional trauma. There is no specific word to describe the symptoms, so they use the term that most closely describes this barbarous act – a violation. The total obliteration of his faith in the safety of his private world. His body has been profaned.
He feels fierce flashes of empathy for women who, barely six months ago, he simply found disgusting – those who have been disfigured, who have suffered female genital mutilation, who have had acid thrown in their faces for refusing to marry. And he also recognises himself in those men unjustly accused of sexual harassment when they are guilty of nothing more than freel
y expressing their desires. He is nostalgic for an era when men and women knew how to give each other pleasure. People think that radical feminists hate men, but what they truly despise are the women who know how to live with men. Dopalet loves women, madly, passionately. He loves to look at their legs on the street, he loves the way their feet arch when they wear high heels, he loves their soft voices and their ability to act like sluts while preening like duchesses. He loves the fact they prize seduction over all things. He respects the mystery of their pleasure, and the more troubling mystery that is the gift of life. He loves women, and he has known many. But he can no longer bear the puritanism imposed by feminists. These days he says as much, loud and clear. He is tired of keeping a low profile, of avoiding clashes and conflicts. Of putting up with the tyranny of feminazis who, because they’re incapable of loving or being loved by men, are trying to eradicate all the wantonness that made this country so appealing. He is no longer going to hold his tongue for fear of upsetting some snowflake. He is determined to trade blow for blow. In every sphere.
The effects of the assault have not all been negative: he is fed up with being polite. He is sick and tired of being submissive. Tired of saying nothing and tolerating the intolerable. Gone is the magnanimity that he has practised for years, the striving to be politically correct, not to offend their sensibilities. He no longer has the strength for political correctness. If he had been stricter, clearer and less indulgent with himself, he would never have taken it into his head to have any dealings with Vodka Satana that might be construed as a friendship. He would happily have screwed her in the context of a fuck-party – why not? – but would never have stooped to having a conversation with the mad bitch. That was where it had all started. With the idiotic notion that it was possible to have relationships with people from inferior social classes. The poor invariably resent the rich for succeeding where they have failed. There you have it. It’s all about jealousy. One good thing came out of the assault: he’s done with bleeding-heart socialism. Not that he doesn’t still think of himself as left wing, but he has had it with Care Bear communism. From now on, there are no filters. He is consumed with rage, the rage of a victim, a pungent flavour he has not experienced before. He is no longer the same man. Circumstances have decided for him.
His assault, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the pervading dread, the financial crisis brutally impacting feature-length movies – trauma follows hard on trauma leaving Dopalet no time to catch his breath. He spends months sweating blood over projects only to have to abandon them. They’re solid projects, he still has the instinct. But unless you’re pitching a comedy about a middle-class family taking in an undocumented African immigrant, there’s no money out there. He doesn’t know what to go for anymore, he’s no longer in sync with those who make the decisions – the distributors and the financiers on the terrestrial networks are like demented rabbits zigzagging in headlights, it’s impossible to predict how they will react. His colleagues are as disconcerted as he is – no-one knows what people want to see at the cinema, and there’s a zero-tolerance policy: one flop and heads roll. In such conditions, it’s difficult to suggest to his partners that they should be taking risks . . . Never in his career has he been so badly treated. By people who have never experienced the same frustrations and humiliations. Not that he hasn’t had his share of bitter disappointments, excruciating times at the Cannes festival, and a few dismal opening weekends – he didn’t come down with the last shower. But he has never experienced this level of violence. The ground is collapsing under their feet, and people don’t have time to waste on being tactful. He is at a complete loss – on every level.
*
He is surprised by his own reactions. He is nurturing a vast, obscure grudge against the world. He harbours vile thoughts. He knows this. He feels a mounting resentment towards the people who trigger these thoughts. He is obsessed with the Jews. This is recent. For the first time in his life, his consciousness has let loose a terrifying hostility that, until now, has been held in check by a total taboo.
But, in this respect, too, he is sick and tired of being politically correct. Are we really going to spend the whole century apologising for crimes we didn’t commit? And he talks to young people and it’s obvious that they’re not going to let themselves be pushed around anymore: it’s all over, the code of silence, the taboo, the nervousness. On the radio, on the T.V., in the newspapers, at dinner parties, Jewish intellectuals are calling for war. He remembers an interview with Céline he watched years ago at his lawyer’s house. This was long before the internet, such curiosities were preserved on V.H.S. tapes. Céline was saying, “You wait and see, the Jews will trigger the next world war, you’ll see.” And Dopalet had been a little embarrassed that his host had shown him the tape. At the time, he felt nothing in particular when he heard these words, which seemed to him to belong to a different age, a madness – a historical dead end. But the words of the author marked him. He often thinks about them. They have taken on a different colour. The Jewish people are belligerent. Authoritarian.
He belonged to a generation that believed in “never again” – a generation raised on World War II films that you stumbled out of thinking, how could people have fallen for all that? Later, his opinion changed. Not that he dreams of anything murderous. He is not insane. He’d just like to be able to talk, in his own country, about how difficult it is to be a film producer, for example, if you’re a goy. That’s all. They witter on all day long, they talk about France as though the country belonged to them, by right, and that Christians like him are tolerated only on condition that they bow and scrape.
His hatred spews out whenever he listens to Zemmour. And sooner or later, everyone is forced to listen to Zemmour: if he’s not on the biggest radio station in France, he’s writing op-ed pieces in the popular press, or he has been invited to speak somewhere. Since the assault, it has become an incontrovertible fact: Dopalet no longer wants to be a laid-back guy. He feels a loathsome hatred welling inside him and he is astonished by its power. Repressed emotion, probably . . . What he finds most unsettling is the pleasure he feels when the hatred courses through him. He feels connected to primitive energy that has been denied him for decades, an energy that is French, patriotic, powerful and rich. He is aware of the monstrousness of his thoughts. He is fifty years old, all his life he has been told not to think such things. But when, for the first time in his life, as he was listening to Zemmour on the radio in a chauffeur-driven car, he said aloud, “Why can’t he shut his fucking mouth, the dumb kike, and go back where he came from!”, it was like losing his virginity. And the smile on the face of the driver – the guy wasn’t even an Arab – after he’d got over his surprise, made Dopalet happy. Finally, he had manned up.
He doesn’t like the Arabs any more than he does the Jews, when he takes a taxi all the way up avenue de Flandre and into Stalingrad, he has no desire to get out and have a coffee, what with the halal butchers, the mosque and the bookshop specialising in djellabas and prayer rugs . . . But he doesn’t give a toss about the Arabs. He only ever sees them when he goes to his tattoo sessions, and then he has other things on his mind. The Jewish lobby, on the other hand, now that is his business, and he’s more than paid his dues. And they make no bones about wielding their power.
He has never taken much of an interest in politics. Cinema isn’t right wing or left wing. He doesn’t read the front pages of the newspapers – he goes straight to the back pages, looks for the culture section, that’s the only part that interests him. Well, he says “the culture section”, but actually he only reads the articles about movies and television. He misses newspapers. On Saturday afternoons, he used to go to WH Smith to buy Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, or Entertainment Weekly, and spend his Sundays leafing through them. He would look at the photos. Reading English was too much effort for him, it was mostly to get a sense of what people were talking about. The tablet is a different thing. The tablet never sleeps. Reading newspapers and magazines wa
s relaxing. Once they were printed, they didn’t change. You could set down a magazine, open it again two months later, nothing had changed. And the idea of reading an article two months after it was published didn’t seem bizarre. The online world is a war. He turns on his tablet and he is dragged into battle – every time he reads an article on his iPad, he ends up taking a tranquilliser.
*
This is another positive aspect of post-traumatic stress: he spends less and less time at work. He spends hours doing fuck-all. And it is in this sort of depressive couldn’t-give-a-flying-fuck space that brilliant ideas come. Ideas are drawn to shit, to boredom, to whole days spent sprawled on a sofa. And it’s been a long time since he gave himself that kind of space.
He spent the days after the assault prostrate, shutters down, licking his wounds. His wife, Amélie, was very attentive. They bonded in adversity. She didn’t ask any questions. This is what he loved about her. She knew her place. There was a little of Anne Sinclair about his wife – she rolled with the punches and kept her head held high. On the other hand, it is highly likely that Amélie suspects that, at the root of the assault, was a peccadillo on his part. If she had asked the question, Dopalet would have sworn the contrary: that was the least that he owed her. He’d go to the gallows denying he’d ever cheated on her. But the most wonderful thing about that proud, jealous woman was that she did not ask a single question.
Amélie had spent her days slaving over the stove, telling the cleaning woman not to go into his study, she had fed him, mopped his brow, got him back on his feet. In the oven she roasted thick côtes de boeuf that she bought from Desnoyer and salted at the last minute, she knew how to cook them perfectly. In a way, the assault had excited her. She pursed her lips, painted them a vivid red, pulled her hair into a chignon and adopted a ramrod straight posture. A mixture of Charlize Theron’s determination to do battle in “Mad Max”, Uma Thurman’s thirst for vengeance in “Kill Bill” and Sabine Azéma in “The Officers’ Ward” for aesthetic reasons – physically Amélie looks a lot like Sabine, it’s something about the pixie face – but chiefly for her devotion. In fact, there are times when he would prefer it if she did less. The support she gave him was precious, but the way she talked about “their” revenge was a little terrifying. Obviously, he planned to even the score. To get revenge for the offence. But the revenge was his. Amélie was the daughter of a military man. When it comes to reprisals, she thinks big. Too big for him. He had described little Aïcha, with her hijab. Without mentioning how intimately he had known her mother, in very different circumstances. Amélie had flown into a rage that lacked moderation – to slake her thirst for justice, she demanded nothing less than the head of every Muslim in Paris, by which she meant the greater Paris area, extending as far as Tours, Lille and Metz, let’s say; a Paris equal to the size of her fury. And when she said “the head of”, she was being literal, she wanted the severed, bleeding head proudly displayed, held by the hair – the kind you see in paintings in the Louvre or the films of Mel Gibson. Nothing symbolic. Initially, he had appreciated this radical empathy. But very quickly he saw it as a reproach: a way of telling him that he lacked manly determination. It didn’t bother her that, for self-evident reasons of discretion, he had not wanted to report the assault to the cops. But, to her, the idea that he was not stalking the streets of Paris with a sabre was unendurable.
Vernon Subutex Three Page 7
