by Alexis Jenni
What glorious times they were, the early days of the First Republic of the Left! We had waited for so long. How long did it last? Fourteen years? Three months of summer? No longer than the Sunday evening it came to power? The next day, as early as the next day, it began to dissolve, like snow which begins to melt when the last flake has fallen. The rungs of the social ladder suddenly led downwards; and what’s more, I jumped. A fall is a kind of sensual pleasure. We have all experienced it in dreams: when you fall, your stomach gently lurches and floats like a helium balloon in the abdominal heavens. This floating is like that feeling of sensual excitement we experience before we realize our genitals can be aroused. Falling is a very antiquated form of sexual pleasure; so I enjoyed falling.
I have almost reached rock bottom. I am living in a part of the old town which no one ever renovates because they cannot find the stairs to reach it. I am above the roofline; all I see of buildings are anonymous slates and tiles, and the roofs themselves are so haphazard that it is impossible to make out the streets below. The cabling dates back to the invention of electricity, with light switches that rotate and wires insulated with cotton. The rendering in the corridors is never painted and is home to a thriving colony of algae that live off electric light. The floor is covered with terracotta tiles that crack, break, disintegrate, giving off the clayey smell of potsherds in an archaeological trench.
When I step outside, I see him. He is lying at the foot of a ‘No Parking’ sign, zipped up in a sleeping bag from which only a filthy hank of hair emerges. Outside my front door, the local tramp lets nothing show. In sleep, he offers only the vestige of a human form, the very form that body bags seek to mask when transporting casualties of war.
The pavements are narrow. I have to step over him to get past. He is curled around the ‘No Parking’ sign. He looks like prey trapped in a spider’s web. He is kept alive, suspended in a cocoon, waiting for the spider to devour him. He has reached rock bottom, but even after the fall is over it takes a long time to die.
I can see how people might be surprised by my attraction to falling. I could have made things simple: jumped out of the window. Or got a sleeping bag and taken to the streets. But what would I do in the streets? I might as well be dead; and that is not what I want. I want to fall, and not to have fallen. I would like to fall slowly, such that the length of my fall describes the heights I had reached. Is that not offensive, in the same way that the disgust of rich people is offensive? Offensive to those who are really falling without wanting to? Surely true suffering entails silence? Yes: silence.
Those who suffer never ask for the right to be silent. Those who do not suffer, on the other hand, turn suffering to their advantage. It is a gambit in the power game, a veiled threat, an inducement to shut us up. Go and live on the streets if you want to! If you’re not happy, get out! If you don’t like it, there’s the door! There are plenty of people waiting who would be more than happy to take your job. In fact, they would be happier with a lowlier position. We’ll offer them a lowlier position and they’ll keep their mouths shut. Glad to get anything. We will negotiate positions downwards, hack a few rungs off the social ladder. We will arrange it so that the rungs go down. People need to keep busy, keep quiet. To limit their expectations. Demand less. Keep their mouths shut. Tramps are like the skulls on spikes at the entrance to a warlord’s territory: they intimidate, they enforce silence.
I am gradually uninstalling myself. I now live in a single room that serves for everything I do; I do very little. All my worldly possessions can be contained in two suitcases; I can carry both at once, one in each hand. But even that is too much. I do not have a free hand. I must fall further. I would like to reduce myself to my earthly body, to be clear in my own heart. Clear about what? I don’t know; but when it comes, I will know.
Be still, my heart: the great fall will come soon. And then I shall know.
I have known better days, and I left them behind.
With my wife, everything went wrong without a word, without a flare-up. The creaking noises we heard we blamed on the failure of communication between the sexes, something so well established that books are written about it; or on compassion fatigue, which is so well attested that ever more books are written on that subject; or else to the vagaries of life, which as everyone knows, is never easy. But our ears were deceiving us: the creaking noises were whirring noises; what we could hear was the sound of a mineshaft being drilled below our feet. The mine exploded in due course, one Saturday. Weekends are ideal for a break-up. You see more of each other, and however much you try to reschedule things, you will invariably end up with some free time. There will always come a point during those two days when you are not working. In the end it was complete carnage!
It began, as always, with a very precise timetable. Do not delude yourself into thinking that free time is genuinely free; it is simply organized differently. For example, Saturday morning: shopping; Saturday afternoon, shopping. Though the words are the same, the concepts are different, since one refers to groceries, the other to anything and nothing. The first is a necessity, the second is a pleasure; the first is a practical constraint, the other a hobby actively pursued.
Saturday evening: friends come round to our place. Other couples we invite for dinner. Sunday morning, a lie-in, on principle. Perhaps a sensual frolic, a little exercise, casual clothes, a spot of brunch, then in the afternoon something I cannot remember. Because we never got as far as the afternoon. That Sunday we did nothing. She cried the whole time. She did nothing but sob in front of me as I said nothing. And then I left.
As a couple, we spent much of our time buying things. Buying is the basis of any couple; as is sex, but sex defines us only personally, whereas buying defines us as a social unit, skilled economic forces who spend what time is not already filled with work or sex spending money on furniture. Together we would talk about buying things and we would buy things; with friends, we would talk about things we had bought and things that we hoped to buy. Houses, clothes, cars, accessories and subscriptions, music, holidays, gadgets. It takes time. Like-minded people can talk about an object of desire indefinitely. It is something that can be bought, since it is an object. Something that can be expressed, and it is reassuring that language can describe it; and it brings with it a boundless despair that cannot be expressed.
On the Saturday everything exploded we went to the supermarket. We pushed our shopping trolley through a crowd of other smartly dressed couples. They came together, like us, some with small children in the trolley’s baby seat. Some even brought infants in carrycots. Sprawled on its back, eyes wide, the baby would stare at the false ceilings hung with garish images, aware of a bustle, a commotion he could not understand, blinded by a light only he could see, since he was lying on his back with his eyes wide open. Before long, the baby would burst into tears, howl and be unable to stop. Before long, the parents would start bickering. The man would invariably be impatient: it was taking too long, the woman wanted to look at everything; she hesitated, determined to make sure she was making the right choice, something that took a while; then she would take offence, while he dragged his feet as though he were bored of being there with his family; he grabbed whatever came to hand, bought recklessly. He adopted a weary air, pretended to be looking elsewhere. An argument would flare; the same words, the same phrases that were formed before they opened their mouths. A quarrel between a couple is as codified as the Indian classical dance: the same postures, the same movement, the same words with their symbolic meanings. It is simply a matter of performance: everything is said without needing to be said. This is how it played out; we were no exception. Except that in our case a quarrel never exploded, it oozed like sweat, because we had no child to flush it out.
That Saturday when the mine beneath our feet exploded, we were pushing a shopping trolley through the supermarket. I went to the chilled meat cabinet and stood, stunned, staring at the trays that seemed to glow from within. I leaned over and stood, f
rozen, and I must have looked a terrifying sight, the light from below casting inverted shadows on my face, my jaw hanging open, my eyes staring. My breath came out as plumes of white mist. I grabbed a vacuum-packed tray of diced meat in one hand and slowly moved it to the other, then put it down, took another, then another, shuffling trays of meat in slow motion like a conveyor belt, a circular movement that had no beginning and no end, cramping from the cold. The cycle continued almost without my involvement. I needed to choose something, but I did not know what. It was impossible not to waver when faced with such overstocked shelves. I could have simply reached my hand into this cornucopia, closed it at random and thereby solved the problem of the menu for that evening; but today it was not simply about eating. Hovering over the chill cabinet, I was acting out a cycle I was powerless to interrupt. I passed trays of stewing steak from hand to hand, picking them up and putting them down in the same movement, I moved the meat around, unable to stop, unable to break the cycle, illustrating against my will – oh no! against my will! – a parody of time frozen. I did not know what to do.
I must have looked terrifying, lit from below, wreathed by the mist streaming from my mouth, standing motionless over the cabinet, with only my hands moving, performing the same action over and over, hesitating as I handled this meat that had been diced dispassionately, sensibly, in the most technical manner possible, such that it was no longer flesh but meat. Everyone who noticed me gave me a wide berth.
I did not know what to do, because I felt nothing; I could not choose, because what I saw did not appeal to me. The meat remained mute, talking through labels; it was just vivid pink shapes, cubes sealed in plastic, nothing but pure form; and to decide between forms requires discursive reasoning; and discursive reasoning does not help to decide anything.
The meat formed piles in front of me, in the chill cabinet so perfectly designed to preserve flesh, beneath fluorescent lights that cast no shadows and gave everything the same colour; I did not know what to do. I could no longer tell which way time was headed. And so I performed the same action over and over, picking up, looking, replacing. I might have carried on until I died of hypothermia and toppled, frozen stiff, into the chill cabinet, to lie among the trays of the meat, a rough-hewn shape, too organic, too crude, laid on top of the neat piles of prepared cuts.
It was Océane’s voice that saved me from dying of cold or being carted off by security guards. Her voice always woke me, always a little too loud, a little too forceful, driven by a glut of decisiveness.
‘Look,’ she was saying. ‘What do you think?’
She waved a black tray full of red cubes under my nose, as though for me to smell, but I could smell nothing. I could not really see either, because my eyes were glazed, having ceased to distinguish between near and distant.
‘A good beef bourguignon,’ she said, ‘with carrots. And a little salad as a starter. I’ve got two packs and a nice cheese platter. I’ll handle this. Will you decide on the wine?’
She continued to wave the meat in front of me in a mechanical gesture, under my nose, in front of my eyes, waiting for approval, for some sign of enthusiasm, anything that might indicate that I understood, that I agreed, that it was a good idea; but I was admiring the geometry of the meat. The smooth, perfectly orthogonal cubes that contrasted perfectly with the black plastic tray. A little serviette at the bottom absorbed the blood; taut plastic film sealed everything from the air and from prying fingers. The cut was perfect, the blood invisible.
‘These are cuboid. There are no cuboid animals.’
‘What animal?’
‘The one they killed to cut up the meat.’
‘Stop it, you’re being gruesome. So, are you OK with tonight’s menu?’
I took charge of the trolley again, which passed as a sign of masculine approval, an appalling gesture, but one that everyone understands. Rolling her eyes, she tossed the tray into the trolley. It fell on to the bags of chopped, washed and prepared salad leaves, next to a pack of frozen carrots covered with hoarfrost.
Pushing the trolley past the open chill cabinets, we came to a vast window that looked on to the in-house butcher’s counter. Diffused light reflected on the tiled walls, casting no shadows, accentuating every detail of the butcher’s art. Carcasses hung from meat hooks in the ceiling, some in the middle of the room, others waiting behind plastic curtains. These were large mammals, I could tell from the outlines, from the arrangement of bones and limbs, identical to our own. Men in masks came and went, carrying butcher knives. They wore plastic overboots smeared with crimson; they wore baggy white overalls on top of their work clothes; their hair was covered by plastic caps, the kind you might wear in the shower. Paper masks hid their noses and mouths; it was impossible to tell them apart, only to see whether they wore glasses. Some had a mesh glove on their left hand and wielded the knife with the other; with their gloved hand they controlled the hanging carcasses, turning them into the light, while the knife glittered in their other hand. Various ghostly apparitions pushed trolleys full of buckets, and in the buckets floated blood-red offcuts marbled with white. Younger figures hosed down the floors, the corners, the areas beneath the cutting tables, then rubbed them down with rubber squeegees. Everything gleamed spotlessly, everything glittered hollowly, everything was translucent. They wielded dangerous tools like razors, as jets of water continually hosed the floors. It was impossible to recognize anyone.
Why can we no longer deal with flesh? What have we done? What have we done, without realizing, so that we can no longer stomach it? What have we forgotten about the processing of flesh?
They rolled a bisected cow, hung from a hook through the legs. I assumed it was a cow by the size, but I could not be sure since the skin, the head, in fact every identifying feature had been removed. All that remained were the bones upholstered in red, the white tendons at each end of the muscles, the blue joints of the limbs, the muscles gorged with blood, covered by a white film of fat. Armed with a power saw, a man in a mask attacked the fleshy body. The carcass quivered under the blade, a vast hunk came loose, quavered, teetered, then suddenly toppled. He caught it as it fell and tossed it on to the metal table where other men with masks and mesh gloves got to work with knives. I could not hear the sounds. Not the wail of the saw or the grinding of bones, not the thud of falling meat or the soft snick of the knives, not the faint clack of the gloves or the jets of water constantly pounding the floor, preventing pools of blood from collecting under the table. I saw only the image. An image that was too detailed, too perfect; too bright and too clear. I felt as though I were watching some S&M movie, because of the lack of sound, of smell, of touch, the supple feel of the flesh as it gave itself up to the knife, the flavourless scent of death, the limp thud as it falls on to a hard surface, the fragile suppleness of a body flayed of skin. There was nothing to assure me I was really here. There was nothing but a brutal thought, assiduously cutting meat into cubes. I felt myself retch. Not from the sight of it, but from the sight disconnected from my other senses. The image alone hovered before me and prickled unpleasantly deep in my throat.
I looked down, turned away from the window intended to highlight the hygienic nature of the slaughter, and continued past the chilled cabinets where the meat was organized by type. OFFAL, BEEF, LAMB, PETS, PORK, CHILDREN, VEAL.
‘PETS’, I could understand. It’s a truncated phrase: what they mean is ‘pet food’. But ‘CHILDREN’. Sandwiched between ‘PORK’ and ‘VEAL’. I studied the plastic trays from a distance, reluctant to pick one up for fear of reproach. Beneath the taut plastic film the flesh was small and pink. It corresponded to the name. Meat: children. I showed the label to Océane, a faint smile trembling on my lips, ready to burst into a loud laugh if she gave me the sign, but she always understood everything. She dismissed this infantile gesture with a shrug, with a weary shake of her head, and we set off again down the long aisles. We continued with our purchases; she read her list aloud, while I pushed the trolley, vainly rumi
nating on the nature and the uses of meat.
We were driving home when we got stuck in a traffic jam along the Saône. Trucks were double-parked next to the market, narrowing the lanes. The traffic lights spent too long on red. We had to wait much longer than we would have liked. The cars, bumper-to-bumper along the embankment, inched forwards in fits and starts, spluttering clouds of noxious fumes that were fortunately dispersed by the light breeze from the river. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, looked everywhere and nowhere, while Océane put the finishing touches to her menu.
‘What can we come up with for dessert that’s original? What would you like?’
What would I like? I regained control of my eyes and looked at her intently. What would I like? My stare must have been unsettling, I did not answer the question. She looked uncomfortable. What would I like? I opened the car door and got out. The engine purred. We were waiting in line for the light to turn green.
‘I’ll see what I can find,’ I said, gesturing towards the market.
I slammed the door and slipped between the stationary vehicles. The light turned green, they started up again. I was in the way. I leapt over to the kerb, acknowledging those who had hooted their horns and revved their engines with a grateful gesture. I assumed that Océane had taken the wheel, preferring not to block the road, rather than follow me and abandon the shopping. Slipping on a pile of discarded vegetables, regaining my balance on a piece of damp cardboard, crushing an orange crate with a terrific crash, I stumbled into the market.
