The Man Who Risked It All

by Laurent Gounelle

  ALSO BY LAURENT GOUNELLE

  The Man Who Wanted to Be Happy

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  Copyright © 2014 by Laurent Gounelle

  Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com® • Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au • Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.za • Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast Books: www.raincoast.com • Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

  Cover design: Shelley Noble • Interior design: Jenny Richards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or persons living or deceased, is strictly coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gounelle, Laurent.

  [Dieux voyagent toujours incognito. English]

  The man who risked it all / Laurent Gounelle ; translated by Alan S. Jackson.—1st edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4019-3814-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Paris (France)—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Jackson, Alan S., translator. II. Title.

  PQ2707.O928D5413 2012

  843’.92—dc23 2013026744

  Tradepaper ISBN: 978-1-4019-3814-7

  17 16 15 14 4 3 2 1

  1st edition, March 2014

  Printed in the United States of America

  Life is a risk.

  If you have not risked, you have not lived.

  It’s what gives … that champagne taste.

  Sœur Emmanuelle

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  About the Author

  1

  THE SOFT, WARM night enveloped me. It was taking me in its arms, carrying me. I could feel my body melting into it, as if I were already floating in the air.

  One more step …

  I wasn’t afraid. And I didn’t want fear to arise suddenly and hold me back, spoiling everything.

  I had imagined hearing the hubbub of the city, so I was surprised by the peace and quiet. Not silence, no, but peace and quiet. All the sounds that reached me were gentle, distant, soothing.

  One little step …

  Slowly, very slowly, I walked along the steel beam that the lights had transformed into dark gold. That night, the Eiffel Tower and I were as one. I was walking on gold, breathing in air that was warm and damp, with a strange scent that was enticing, intoxicating. Beneath me, 360 feet below, lay Paris, offering herself to me. Her twinkling lights were so many winking, calling eyes. Patiently, aware she was irresistible, she was waiting for my blood to come and fertilize her.

  One more step …

  I had thought it all out and carefully prepared for what I was about to do. I had chosen it, accepted it, made it part of me. Very calmly, I had made up my mind to end a life that was devoid of purpose or meaning, that no longer offered anything that was worth the trouble.

  One step …

  My life was a string of failures that had begun even before my birth. My father—if that’s what you can call the vulgar progenitor—had not even judged me worthy of knowing him. He had left my mother as soon as she told him she was pregnant.

  Was it with the intention of getting rid of me that she had tried to drown her despair in a Paris bar? The many drinks she had consumed with the American businessman she met there did not, however, cloud her mind. He was 39; she was 26. She was anxious; his relaxed air reassured her. He seemed well off; she was struggling to survive. She gave herself to him that night, calculatingly and with hope. The next morning, she was tender and loving, and I will never know if it was sincerely or out of weakness that he said yes, of course, if ever she became pregnant, he wanted her to keep the child and stay by his side.

  She followed him to the United States, and in the land of excess, nobody was surprised that I came into the world at seven-and-a-half months already weighing nearly six-and-a-half pounds. I was given an American name, and so I became Alan Greenmor, an American citizen. My mother learned English and managed as best she could to adapt to life in her adopted country. But things took a tragic turn. Five years after they arrived, my new father lost his job, and, unable to find another one during the pre-Reagan economic crisis, he spiraled down into alcoholism. He became bad-tempered, uncommunicative, and depressed. My mother was disgusted by his lack of initiative and constantly criticized him for his spinelessness. Deeply resentful, she continually looked for ways to provoke him, using the slightest transgression as an excuse to criticize him. His lack of reaction led her to increase the attacks, heaping on more and more insults. She seemed to derive some satisfaction when he at last got angry, preferring his anger to his apathy. I was terrified by her game. I loved my parents and couldn’t bear to see them destroying each other. My father’s fits of anger were rare but explosive, and I feared them as much as my mother desired them. When she at last got a reaction from him, she had an adversary, a man who could stand up for himself. She finally had an outlet for her built-up resentment, and she really lashed out with her tongue. One evening, my father beat her, and I was less traumatized by his violence than by the perverse pleasure I read on my mother’s face. One night, during a particularly terrible argument, my mother flung in his face that I was not really his son—a fact that I became aware of at the same time. He left the house the next day and was never seen again. My second father had left me as well.

  My mother struggled to keep us alive. She worked long hours, six days a week, in a laundry. She brought its chemical smells home every night. When she came to kiss me at bedtime, I no longer recognized my mother’s much-loved scent, the scent that before had reassured me, inviting me to sleep as it enveloped me in tenderness.

  One step, then another …

  After my father left, my
mother went from one low-level job to another, believing each time that she could rise up through the ranks, get a promotion, and earn more. She also went from lover to lover, with the hope of keeping one and setting up a home. I think one day she realized that all these hopes about her life were futile, and that is when she focused everything on me. I would succeed where she had failed. I would earn so much money that she would be wealthy, too. From that moment, my education became her absolute priority. I was ordered to bring home good grades. At meals, our conversation revolved around school, the teachers, my results. My mother became my trainer; I was her colt. Speaking French with her and English with the rest of the world, I had been bilingual from birth. She repeated endlessly that this was a major asset. I was sure to become an international businessman or a great interpreter. She even imagined me as Secretary of State. Only losers have no ambition, she said. I was very afraid of disappointing her, so I worked as hard as I could in school, getting good marks. But my success only increased her expectations of me; it confirmed that her strategy was working.

  It was a terrible blow the day my mother learned that in the United States a college education isn’t free. It costs money, and top dollar at that. It was the first time I ever saw her downcast. All her plans were destroyed. Perhaps she really was cursed, but it didn’t take long for her natural character to regain the upper hand. She made an appointment with the principal of my school to convince him that a young American citizen shouldn’t be left by the wayside when his high grades were evidence of how he might serve his country if he were given access to the lofty positions a college education would ensure. There must be a solution, she said. Weren’t there scholarships or grants or something? She came home from the meeting all fired up. It was very simple, she said. There was a six-letter answer: sports. If I was very good at sports, there was a good chance a college would waive its tuition, just to get me on its team and increase its chances of winning tournaments.

  And so, without ever daring to admit to my mother that I loathed sports, I was subjected to an intensive training regime. She pushed me, motivated me, encouraged me, continually scrutinizing my results. Now she seemed unconcerned about my grades. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she would repeat nonstop. In the end, it was baseball that I turned out to be least bad at. From then on, I lived for baseball. To motivate me, she pinned posters of the stars on the Detroit Tigers to my bedroom wall. I drank my breakfast milk from a mug with a picture of the Tigers on it. There were Tigers everywhere: on my key ring, my T-shirts, my socks, my bathrobe, my pens. I ate Tigers, I wrote Tigers, I washed Tigers, I even slept Tigers. Baseball haunted my dreams. My mother had succeeded in sponsoring my brain, sliding billboards into my thoughts. She enrolled me in Little League and worked overtime to pay the dues. I spent three hours a day minimum, five on weekends, playing baseball. The coach’s shouts still ring in my ears, all these years later. I hated the sport but I loved my mother, and I would have done anything not to disappoint her. She had spent her life keeping her hopes up, and I had the impression she would stop living the day she had nothing more to hope for.

  The future proved me right. My mother died several years later, just after my graduation from business school. I found myself alone, holding an MBA that I hadn’t really wanted, having spent my school years rubbing shoulders with young people whose tastes and aspirations I didn’t share. I was offered a job as deputy head of the suppliers’ accounts department of a large company. The salary was good, but the work soon turned out to be uninteresting. I wasn’t really disappointed, however, as I wasn’t expecting anything. My mother’s life had taught me at an early age that hopes were futile.

  One more step …

  After a few years of an empty, pointless life, I left for France, almost on a whim. Was it an unconscious desire to reconnect with my origins, or was I trying to undo the legacy of my mother’s miserable life by going in the opposite direction? I don’t know. At any rate, I found myself in Paris and decided to stay. The city is beautiful but that wasn’t the reason. There was something else: an intuition or a premonition that my destiny lay there.

  At the time, I didn’t know that I would want to die there so soon.

  I looked for a job, and got an interview at Dunker Consulting, a recruitment agency that searched for accounts managers for big companies. The interviewer told me I was unemployable in France, as French accounts were kept according to very different regulations than American ones. “You might as well start qualifying again from scratch,” he had said, laughing at a joke only he could see. On the other hand, he said that my overall knowledge of accounting, along with my American background, made me a desirable candidate to become a recruitment consultant in their firm. Their main clients were large American companies that would appreciate having their recruitment handled by an American. “Impossible,” I told him. “Recruitment is not my thing. I know absolutely nothing about it.” The interviewer gave me a knowing smile, like the experienced older man faced with the embarrassed young woman who admits at the last minute that she is still a virgin. “We’ll take care of that,” he said.

  So I was hired and spent the first two weeks in intensive training, along with other young recruits who were going to contribute to the firm’s sustained development. Our average age was 30, which seemed to me extremely young to be practicing this profession. Evaluating the qualities and aptitudes of a candidate amounted to judging a human being, and I was nervous at having to assume such a responsibility. Apparently my fellow trainees didn’t share my fear; they obviously enjoyed slipping into the respected role of the recruiter. The shared feeling in the group was of belonging to a certain elite. Pride left no room for doubt.

  For two weeks, we were taught the tricks of the trade: a simple but sensible method for conducting recruitment interviews, as well as a string of gimmicky techniques that I think of today as so much nonsense. I learned that after welcoming a candidate, you were to stay silent for a few moments. If the applicant started speaking on his own, you were probably dealing with a leader. If he patiently waited to be asked a question, his reserve fit the profile of a follower. We were to invite the recruit to introduce himself in a very open way—“Tell me about yourself”—without asking specific questions from the outset. If the candidate launched off on his own, it showed he was independent. If he asked us where we wanted him to begin—should he start with his education, for example, or go back in time from his most recent employment—then he lacked initiative.

  We practiced applying the techniques in role-playing exercises conducted in pairs. One of us played the role of the recruiter while the other put himself in the place of the candidate, inventing a background and a career so that we could practice holding interviews and asking questions to expose the “truth” about the candidate. What was most surprising to me was the competitive atmosphere that prevailed during these exercises. Everyone tried to trap their partner, who was seen alternately as a liar to be unmasked or an enemy to be deceived. The funniest thing was that the trainer, a salaried consultant with Dunker Consulting, entered into the competition as well, taking particular pleasure in highlighting omissions or blunders. “You’re being had!” was his favorite phrase, spoken in a mocking voice, as he supervised the role plays, gliding among the pairs as we practiced. The insinuation was that he would have known how to handle the situation.

  At the end of two weeks, we were pronounced fit for service.

  I found myself spending my days behind a desk listening to timid men telling me about their careers, their faces red with fright as they tried to make me believe that their three main shortcomings were perfectionism, too much accuracy, and a tendency to work too hard. They were miles away from suspecting that I was even more timid than they were and even more ill at ease. I was just a bit luckier than them because my role gave me an advantage that was far from insignificant: I got others to speak rather than speaking myself. But each time I undertook a search, I dreaded the moment when I would be force
d to tell nine candidates out of ten that their applications didn’t fit the required profile. I felt like I was pronouncing a prison sentence. My unease increased theirs, which reinforced mine, in a hellish vicious circle. I was suffocating in the role, and the atmosphere within the company did nothing to lighten my mood. The human values on display were only a façade. The daily reality was tough, cold, competitive.

  It was Audrey who allowed me to survive in this situation. I met her one Sunday afternoon at Mariage Frères on the Rue des Grands Augustins. I only had to set foot in this place to feel soothed. As soon as I opened the door, the first step on the old oak flooring plunged me into the refined atmosphere of a tea merchant’s shop in the days of the French colonial empire. I was bewitched by the mixed fragrances of the hundreds of teas stored in immense antique jars; their scents transported me in a flash to the Far East of the 19th century.

  It was while I was ordering a quarter of a pound of Sakura from the young man behind the counter that a voice whispered in my ear that the Sakura Impérial was finer. I turned around, surprised that a stranger was talking to me in this city where everyone seemed to be encased in their own bubble, haughtily ignoring everyone else. Her exact words were: “You don’t believe me? Come and taste for yourself.” Taking me by the hand, she led me across the room, weaving through the customers and the displays of teapots from faraway places to the little staircase that climbed to the tasting room. Here the ambiance was intimate, elegant. Waiters in colored raw silk suits glided silently between the tables with a ceremonious attitude. In my casual clothes, I was an anachronism. We sat in a corner at a little table with a white cloth, set with silver cutlery and china cups bearing the Mariage Frères crest. Audrey ordered two teas, hot scones, and a coup de soleil, or strawberries-and-cream tart—the specialty she said I absolutely had to try. (I immediately enjoyed our conversation. She was a fine arts student and lived in a garret in the Latin Quarter. “You’ll see, it’s really nice,” she told me, thereby indicating that our meeting would not stop at the door to Mariage Frères.)