The Man Who Risked It All

by Laurent Gounelle

  Meditating on my revenge, I walked through the streets of Paris. The sky was threatening, full of big, black clouds. The air smelled of a thunderstorm. I was walking so fast that sweat began to gather on my brow. Was it the exertion or my anger? I could no doubt file a complaint and get some compensation, but then what? How could I carry on working in those conditions? The atmosphere would become unbearable. My colleagues would probably no longer dare to be seen in my company. Would I last long in such circumstances? Of course not.

  Gradually, my anger gave way to bitterness, then despondency. I hadn’t felt so depressed since the day Audrey left me. She was a shooting star in my life, come to let me experience joy before disappearing in the night. If only she’d told me the reasons for her decision. If she had expressed criticism or blame, I could have blamed myself for her loss, or blamed her and thereby given her up more easily. As it was, her sudden, unexplained departure had prevented me from turning the page, from drawing a line under our relationship, and I missed her terribly. When my thoughts turned back to her, the loss tormented me. The memory of her smile bathed me in sadness. A part of me had disappeared with her. My body missed her body, and my soul felt orphaned.

  It started to rain, a fine, melancholic drizzle. I carried on walking, slower now. I didn’t want to go home. Turning my back to the Louvre, I left the Rue de Rivoli and entered the Tuileries Garden, empty now, the people chased away by the rain. I walked along a path, under the trees. Finally, I sat down on an isolated stump. I thought of how unfair life could be. My childhood no doubt explained the lack of self-confidence I suffered from. I wasn’t responsible for it, and it tortured me. And as if that wasn’t enough, it attracted all the sorts for whom I was a natural victim, punishing me all over again. Life doesn’t spare those who are suffering; it inflicts a double penalty on us.

  I remained like this for a long time. In the end, I got up and instinctively headed for Dubreuil’s neighborhood. He alone would be able to restore my morale.

  The rain was beginning to stream down my cheeks and my neck. I felt as if it was washing me of what I had suffered, cleansing me of my shame.

  I arrived at the gate to the mansion at the end of the day. The windows were closed, and the place seemed lifeless. I was suddenly certain that Dubreuil was not there. Usually he gave off such energy that it seemed possible to feel his presence even without seeing him, as if his aura could radiate through the walls.

  I rang the videophone.

  A man told me that monsieur had gone out. He didn’t know when he would be back.

  “What about Catherine?”

  “She is never here when he is away, sir.”

  I wandered in the area a bit, finding pretexts not to go home, then had a bite to eat in one of the few local restaurants. I was frustrated not to see Dubreuil. A thought entered my mind: Suppose he, too, was the sort attracted by my weakness? After all, I had met him in very special circumstances, where my fragility was totally exposed. All this brought me back again to his motives for taking an interest in me, for helping me. Why was he doing all this? I would so have liked to know more, but how? I had no means of investigating.

  An image came back to me. The notebook. The notebook held clues to the answer, it was obvious. But how could I get to it without being devoured by his cursed dog? There must be a way. I paid my bill, bought Les Echos from the pile on the counter, and went back to the château, this time walking on the sidewalk across the avenue. I sat down on a bench and opened my paper. There were four rows of trees between me and Dubreuil’s gate. It seemed reasonable to assume that I could observe it without being spotted. I had an idea that I wanted to check out. I scanned Les Echos, reading news about businesses that, large or small, all had the same objective: increasing their market value. I occasionally looked up at the château. Nothing. Time went by slowly, very slowly. Around half past nine, a light came on in a ground floor room, soon followed by others in the neighboring rooms. I couldn’t see the window of Dubreuil’s office since it looked out onto the garden, at the back of the château. I looked closely but saw no one. I went back to my newspaper, keeping an eye on the windows. It would still be light for another half an hour. After that, it would be hard to remain credible with my newspaper open. I would have to find something else to do. I came across an article by Fisherman that once again expressed his doubts about Dunker Consulting’s strategy. “The management lacks vision,” he had written. Sad to say, I was pleased to read something negative about my company.

  It was getting darker and darker. I was getting tired of waiting. The air, full of moisture after the rain, gave off the strong scent of the lime trees lining the avenue. In the end, I lay down on the bench, the newspaper acting as a pillow. I didn’t take my eyes off the château. Fewer and fewer cars were going by. The area was bathed in a surprising calm, barely disturbed from time to time by the distant noise of an accelerating motorbike.

  At 10 P.M. precisely, I made out a slight noise far off, which I immediately recognized. It was the electric lock on the little door beside the mansion gate. I looked carefully but saw nobody. Yet I was sure I had heard the characteristic noise.

  The door to the house opened suddenly. I tensed. I wanted to sit up to see better, but I was afraid of drawing attention to myself. It was better to remain as I was. I saw nothing for several seconds, and then four people came out of the house together. They shut the door behind them and crossed the front garden, then exited through the little door that had been unlocked electronically from inside. It was the staff. They exchanged a few words briefly, and then separated. One of them crossed the avenue toward me. My pulse began to race. Had he spotted me? I decided to stay motionless. If he came up to me, I would close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. After all, I had called earlier in the evening and had been told about Dubreuil’s absence, so it wasn’t so far-fetched to have waited for him on a bench and then fallen asleep. And if he had come home in the meantime, I could very well have missed him while I was having dinner. I screwed up my eyes without losing sight of the servant. After reaching the pavement, he turned left and stopped at a bus shelter. I relaxed. I resumed my observation of the château, as the area was once more plunged into complete calm. Seven minutes later, a bus arrived. I checked to make sure that the man got on. It was 10:13 P.M. I was beginning to get stiff. Nothing more happened for a long while. My discomfort was becoming unbearable. Finally, I sat up, and at that precise moment, a powerful light came on, illuminating the garden in front of the château. I dived back down on my bench. The front door opened, and Dubreuil appeared. Immediately, Stalin began to bark, giving yelps of joy. His master went over to him. I heard his voice and saw the dog’s tail wagging. Dubreuil leaned over, and a moment later, Stalin was bounding all around him, freed from his chain. Half past ten precisely.

  The dog stood up on its hind legs, and Dubreuil affectionately grabbed it by the neck. They played for a few minutes, and then the master went back inside and turned off the outside light, plunging the garden into darkness again. The dog ran off to the back of the château.

  I got up, racked with pain, and walked to the bus stop. A glance at the timetable: The bus that had arrived at 10:13 P.M. was scheduled to come at 10:10. It was three minutes late.

  So there were 17 minutes between the servants’ departure and Stalin’s release. Was that enough time for me to get into the house? Perhaps. But weren’t there other employees still inside? And how to get into the garden? After that, it would be easy to get into the château, since the windows remained open at this time of year, but how was I to get into the office without being seen? It all seemed very risky. I would have to get more information.

  I walked to the Métro and went home. I hadn’t been back five minutes when Madame Blanchard turned up. How could she have the cheek to trouble her tenant at such a late hour? I hadn’t even been particularly noisy. I don’t know if the build-up of my resentment against Dunker since the morning was the reason for it, but for the first time, I
allowed my anger toward my landlady to explode. Very surprised to start with, she didn’t lose her composure altogether and vehemently reminded me of the house rules. She was worse than all the others put together; nothing and no one could get the better of her!

  17

  YVES DUBREUIL LET out a long, hearty laugh. Catherine, usually impassive, was holding her sides as well. I had just told them about my unsuccessful attempts at gestural synchronization with the guy in the Métro.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny. I almost got beaten up because of you.”

  They didn’t answer, still doubled over.

  “I ought to be the one making fun of you!” I said. “Your trick doesn’t work!”

  Between fits of laughter, Dubreuil repeated what the African man had said, imitating his accent: “Ya finished taking da piss, mon?”

  They broke out in uncontrollable laughter again, so contagious that in the end I had to join them.

  We were on the terrace on the garden side of the mansion, comfortably seated in deep teak armchairs. The late afternoon sun gave a bronze color to the carved stone of the building. The stone was beginning to radiate the accumulated heat, and, along with it, the delicate perfume of the immense climbing rose that clung to the wall.

  I was enjoying this moment of rest, as I was beginning to feel the exhaustion of the previous night. Three times my sleep had been interrupted to go and smoke a cigarette.

  I poured myself some more orange juice, lifting with difficulty the imposing ornate crystal carafe in which ice cubes clinked together. We had eaten early, a very light Thai meal prepared by the château chef and served on a magnificently decorated table, the most astounding sight being the pyramids of spices laid out in the center of the table on silver plates.

  “In fact,” said Dubreuil, who was gradually becoming serious again, “you made two mistakes, which explain your failure. First, when you are synchronizing with the other’s posture, you must respect a certain lapse of time before following his movements, so that he doesn’t feel mimicked. Then, and this is the crucial point, you did this like a technique that you were applying. But a technique is the last thing it is! First and foremost, it’s a frame of mind to get into, a philosophy for discovering the other. It only works if you want to enter the other’s universe, to live it from inside, putting yourself in his place to feel what he feels and see the world with his eyes. Then, if your desire is sincere, gestural synchronization is the little bit of magic that enables you to establish contact and create a quality of relationship that the other will want to preserve—which explains why he may unconsciously follow your movements. But this is only the result; it can’t be the goal.”

  “Yes, but you’ll admit it’s incredible enough to make you want to experience it!”

  “Of course.”

  “I also tried something else, which more or less worked: creating a contact with my manager by synchronizing myself with his way of thinking. It was Luc Fausteri, who’s very cold, very rational, and doesn’t much like chatting.”

  “You chose well.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If you’re going to embrace someone else’s world, you might as well choose someone very different from you. It’s more interesting. It’s a greater voyage. By the way, did I tell you what Proust said about this?”

  “Marcel Proust, the French writer? No, not that I remember.”

  Dubreuil recited from memory: “The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not toward new landscapes but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each one of them can see, or can be.”

  Catherine nodded her head in approval.

  A bird landed on the edge of the table, visibly interested in the contents of the large plate of tidbits that we had barely touched. It must be strange to see the world through the eyes of a bird. Does each bird have its own unique experience, different from that of every other bird?

  Dubreuil took a small salmon canapé, and the bird flew away.

  “It’s not easy,” I went on, “to put yourself in the shoes of someone whose universe you don’t particularly like. That was what was hard for me with Fausteri. I’m not thrilled by numbers like he is, by the changes in our results or the company’s share price. I tried hard to talk about these topics, but I probably lacked conviction or sincerity. At any rate, I didn’t feel him opening up to me.”

  “I can understand not liking numbers, and the idea is not to simulate an interest in the tastes or business of the other. No, the principle is to be interested in his person to the point of trying to feel the pleasure that he can find in numbers. It’s very different. So when you synchronize with his movements, when you assume his values, when you share his concerns, do it simply with the intention of slipping into his skin to live his world from inside.”

  “What you mean is that I don’t have to try to be interested in numbers but just to put myself in his place by saying: ‘Hey, what’s it like? What do you feel when you’re interested in numbers?’ Is that it?”

  “Exactly! And to enjoy experiencing what is, as it happens, completely new for you. And that’s where the miracle will take place on the relational level; that’s where you’ll be completely on the same wavelength.”

  I reached out and took a canapé, a slice of delicately smoked salmon crowned by a hint of sour cream and a miniature asparagus spear sprinkled with lemon juice. “There is a limit, though,” I said. “It doesn’t work with everyone.”

  “Yes, it does. That’s precisely the special feature of this approach.”

  “If you have to be sincerely interested in the other as a person for it to function, that’s virtually impossible to do with your enemies.”

  “Quite the contrary. It’s the best way to beat them! I embrace my rival the better to choke him, as the old saying goes.”

  “When you hate someone or he’s making you suffer, you absolutely don’t feel like getting inside his skin to feel what he’s feeling,” I insisted.

  “That’s true, and yet, it’s often the only way to understand what is causing him to behave in this way toward you. As long as you remain where you are, you limit yourself to suffering or rejecting the other, but that changes nothing about the situation. You have no influence over him. Whereas if you put yourself in his place, you can discover why he’s acting this way. If he’s a torturer, then look at the situation with his torturer’s eyes and you’ll understand what’s driving him to torture. It’s the only hope you have of making him stop. You don’t change people by rejecting them.”

  “Hmm …”

  “When you reject someone or simply his ideas, you force him to dig in his heels and stand his ground. Why should he take an interest in what you have to say if you reject his point of view?”

  “You have a point.”

  “If you make the effort—sometimes unpleasant—of assuming his point of view, you will grasp what is leading him to think what he thinks, to behave as he behaves. And if he feels understood and not judged, perhaps he’ll be able to hear what you have to say to try and make him change his position.”

  “It can’t work every time.”

  “Granted, but the opposite approach never works. Generally, the more you seek to convince someone, the more you generate resistance. The more you want him to change his opinion, the less likely he is to change it. Physicists have known this for a long time.”

  “Physicists? What’s a physicist got to do with human relations?”

  “It’s the law of dynamics. Isaac Newton proved that when you exercise a force of a certain strength on an object, it produces an opposite force of equal strength. Well, it’s the same for human relations. When you use energy to try and convince someone, it’s as though you were directing a force at him that applies pressure. He feels the pressure, and this makes him push in the opposite direction. Push him, he’ll push you back.”

  “What’s the solution then?
Because if what you say is true, the more you want to convince the less you’ll succeed. So what do you do exactly?”

  “You don’t push, you pull.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Pushing is starting from your position and wanting to impose it on the other. Pulling is starting from the other’s position and gradually bringing him to you. You see, we’re still in the philosophy of synchronization. Pulling involves going into the other’s universe as well, but this time to allow him to change. The point of departure is still the same: Go and find the other where he is.”

  “Push him, he’ll push you back.” I repeated Dubreuil’s formula under my breath, thinking of all the times I had really shown conviction in vain.

  “Moreover, the opposite is true as well. When you try to get rid of someone who’s a nuisance, the more you push them away, the more they will stick around.”

  It reminded me of my exchanges with Madame Blanchard. The more I tried to fight against her criticism and her abusive intrusion into my private life, the more she continued. The last time, when I had gotten angry, almost shutting the door in her face, she had pushed it back open while criticizing me more vehemently than ever.

  I replayed the scene for Dubreuil. He listened carefully in silence, and then I saw his eyes gleam. He had obviously just had an idea he seemed proud of.

  “Do you have a solution?”

  “Here’s what you’re going to do …” He outlined his idea.

  I felt myself getting paler and paler. The further he got into his explanation, the more detailed he became about what I had to do, feeling perhaps that he had to counter my incredulity with precise directives. What he wanted of me was quite simply un-ac-cept-a-ble. I had balked at several of his tasks in the past, only to finally give in. But this was impossible. Just thinking about what he was asking of me, I could feel myself fainting.