‘Yes. For no reason. But you didn’t do anything, did you? You just carried on eating like everyone else. You accepted that man’s humiliation. Or am I wrong?’
Simon raised his hand. A childlike gesture calling for peace. He didn’t want to hear any more. He stammered an apology and walked away. He disappeared quickly into a long corridor and, suddenly stumbling across a sofa in a corner, slumped onto it. Images from his whole life whirled before his eyes: the faces of Jane Hilland, Zadie Zale and others; the image of Matthieu, his erstwhile friend, raising a glass at the party they had jointly organised, just below the heavens in the golden age of the three terraces when nothing had mattered, when it had been enough to be friends and to live. How wonderful everything had been then, suspended in time and space, between earth and heaven, in the dazzling glare of youth. It was an ordinary story of betrayal, like so many others, and yet it was also his whole life, revised and corrected, distorted by bitterness and by the insistent, guilty and ultimately unendurable feeling that he had not done as he should have, that he had not been equal to the situation. The girl he had failed to seduce at the party, the young maths student that Matthieu had taken to his lair on the rooftops, and who had later found a partner, a husband, a man like him rather than like Matthieu, that girl was his life! It was life that he had failed to seduce, because he had been afraid of it, because he had shown himself incapable of being its partner, because he had stayed in his goldfish bowl. Just as he had allowed the waiter to be beaten in an incident of breathtaking social revelation, the rich man hitting the poor. The other man had simply sat down again looking affronted, when in fact he was revelling in having established his power, having demonstrated his apelike strength to his son, to his wife, to everyone present. Secretly satisfied. If he had really been a strong man – and he was all too aware that this belated remorse was pathetically weak, terribly pusillanimous, like children who in retrospect see themselves as gallant knights – Simon would have got up, gone over and broken the guy’s nose. A punch, a single blow to break the bone. But he hadn’t done so. He had simply hesitated, glanced around him and then gone back to his meal, leaving the waiter to clamber to his feet amid the smashed crockery.
The strangest thing was that, of all his regrets, Jane’s face was no more important than that of the young girl he had met only twice. She had probably cheated on him and he now understood why Matthieu had moved out of the apartment so suddenly. But Jane had at least given him a feeling for living, a fleeting completeness which deep down, he realised, was the only truth. Feeling and experiencing as intensely as possible. He chuckled: was this what he was turning into, a mystic?
Simon got to his feet and, stumbling awkwardly, looked for the exit. He pushed at the wrong doors, turned down several dead-end corridors before finding the grand lobby. And there, he stood open-mouthed.
They were destroying everything.
The party was over. The initial cheerfulness and jollity had turned, fuelled by alcohol, into a disturbing frenzy. Jaws clenched, muscles contracted round their sledgehammers, they pounded. They were breaking everything, mirrors, chandeliers, panelling, furniture. All these people had come from far-off countries to slake their thirst for carnage. They were drunk on their destruction. They hammered. They smashed. They shattered in a roar of annihilation. A barbaric pleasure came over them as they destroyed the old world.
Simon surveyed the scene, horrified and appalled. He walked across the lobby, invisible among these brutes, fleeing this orgy that sickened him. He stepped back into the street, whose darkness closed around him. And in the muffled echo of the carnage, he walked along the pavement like a disoriented puppet, his footsteps making a dull thud. Abandoning all struggles, he hoped for nothing now but darkness and silence.
He was happy: he was vanquished.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my father, who has once again become one of my first readers, and my family for their support.
I would also like to thank the team at Le Passage, ever helpful and efficient, and my friends Julien Carmona and Emmanuel Valette for their precious information about the very precise world of finance – though this novel, of course, is entirely my responsibility.
Lastly, thank you to Caroline. For everything.
Sila's Fortune Page 26
